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As a person who started learning Lisp after years and years of using mostly mainstream languages, I have to at least partially disagree. I will say this, however: Lisp is, at first, difficult to read for many people. But I think it is mainly difficult to read for people who are used to reading programs written in languages with Algol-like syntax (C, C++, Java, Perl, etc). If you've been writing programs for 5, 10, or 15 or more years mostly in languages that all have that common ancestry, it is understandable that your brain will (at first) work against you when reading something like Lisp. However, after using it for a reasonable period of time, I found that it became much easier to read. And now I don't find it any more difficult to read than any of the mainstream languages that I have used in the past. I think that, in fairness to Lisp, if you take two people who have never programmed in their life, and if each of the two has a reasonable and approximately equal amount of skill and potential for being a decent developer, and taking those two individuals, you teach one to develop in Lisp, and one in, say Java. Given that situation, I don't think the Lisp developer will find his code more difficult to read really at any stage of his learning (more difficult that is, than the Java developer finds his code to read at a similar stage of learning). It seems to me, from every testimony I've read from developers who have come to Lisp after extensive careers using other more popular languages, that there is a "breaking in" period where it takes some time to get used to things. However, anyone I've read about who put in any reasonable effort to learn a Lisp (or a language related to Lisp, like Scheme) seems to repeat what others like him or her have said -- you get used to the syntax after a while, and then at the very least it no longer bothers you or gets in your way. |