Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Abraham S.A.H." via "Emacs development discussions. wrote:

>> Lisp is stronger at universities.
>
> Not in Asia!  I can't name a  university in Asia where Lisp
> is taught. Lisp was never taught in our universities.  Not
> in Asia and not in the Middle East.  Perhaps in Japan?

Emacs-w3m is from Japan <3

Seriously, I can't name any universities anywhere except mine
but I can guarantee 100% that Lisp is stronger relatively in
CS classes and the like than it is everywhere else.

Emacs and a few other important applications are written in
Lisp (Emacs is partly written in Elisp), other than that Lisp
is a hobby for some part of the computer elite.

>> In some instances the indented style and excessive use of
>> () makes working with lisp code harder than
>> other languages.
>
> Are you  sure?  I'm a Python  programmer and I don't 
> think so.

I am sure. Edit something here in Lisp, you have to edit it
somewhere else as well, often. This, in combination with the
stacking of parenthesis that happens, has caused more syntax
errors than I would like to know.

> My   father   basically    hates   whitespace   sensitive  
> languages. Perhaps it's about taste difference?

No. Just think, remove this line in Lisp

some-item))

then you have to find the right place if that is to be removed
as well. Not only that, you have to identify the right
parenthesis and remove them and nothing else. When there are
a lot, it is difficult to see.

I know there is matching, commands to automate, yada yada.
But it is still much more difficult than just killing lines
in Python.

As an example, have you ever had a syntax error when doing
`let' in Elisp?

(let ((x 5)
      (...))
  ...)

Have you ever had a similar situation when doing x = 5
in Python? Why not?

The Python syntax is ugly but for all practical purposes it is
faster and less error prone, and much, much easier to maintain
for other people or for you x years from now.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal