No, what he's saying is that a good team knows when to use the guns, and how to aim them. A good OO team knows how to layer their types, how to relate them, and when to stop. A good asm team knows how to handle nonlocal jumps, when to use them and when not to. Every paradigm has its guns. You're just paying extra attention to the lisp ones.
> You're just paying extra attention to the lisp ones.
Because people in this thread are attempting to put-forward lisps' macros (and writing code as an AST) as some big win, without acknowledging that it comes with a massive cost. Lisp-y, inexpressive, paren-soup syntax. I'm saying myself (and presumably many others else lisps would be more popular) don't buy the trade-off.
If you like it, and your team like it then great. But don't act like it's definitely win-win, and people who choose not to use lisps just haven't achieved enlightenment yet.
I never said you haven't acheived enlightenment...
But Lisp's syntax is actually pretty expressive and nice, once you get used to it, IMHO. You continually deny this, and while you're free to disagree (many do), you continually argue that the mine and other's opinions are Bad and Wrong. I find this frustrating.
This feels like it's fallen back into a more boring criticism: you just don't like Lisp's syntax. Ok, fine, everyone has a criticism about every other programming language's syntax. Maybe I hate Python's mandatory indentation. These kinds of criticisms are not really the most interesting ones though.
I don't think you can put those things on the same scale. I think it's telling that you dismiss Lisp's syntax like it's unimportant rather than acknowledging that it's the several hundred lb elephant in the room whenever it comes to talking about lisps.
What I'm arguing is that Lispers say that all the parens and lack of other, more expressive constructs are worth it because you get macros. I'm arguing that's a bad trade-off, because 1. that's a big sacrifice, 2. macros aren't a win.
