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This is my impression, too. When I was TAing an intro CS course back in university, I saw students new to programming struggling with Lisp (specifically Scheme in this case) much earlier in the learning process than even C. This manifested in a few spots. The first is, yes, s-expressions. Yes, yes, I know, s-expressions are integral to the power of lisp, and they're really not hard to read once you get used to them. All of that is beside the point. The reality I saw on the ground, when teaching people to program, is that even people who have no prior programming experience whatsoever, and therefore no preconceptions to get over, have a harder time grasping s-expressions than they do algol-style syntax. I don't know why. I didn't have the same problem myself. But it's a real phenomenon that I struggled to help people through on a regular basis, and the lisp community's defensiveness about it is not going to make it go away. Arbitrary-seeming names with zero mnemonic value is another problem. Car, cdr, progn, etc. - it takes a special kind of personality to not be put off by this sort of stuff. Not everyone has that kind of personality. Not everyone should have that kind of personality. Finally, all the hair-splitty (at least to a newcomer) distinctions to contend with. =, eq, eql, equal, and equalp, or let, let* and letrec. Sure, there are reasons for these distinctions. But a language that can get by without quite so many of them is going to be a lot more attractive to newcomers. Even if it comes at the cost of footguns, if they're unlikey to be discovered until later. |