[arethuza]

"you need to spend some time learning the syntax"

But Lisp has rather less syntax than most other programming languages - and that's possibly a weakness rather than a strength when it comes to anyone new to the language.

I suspect there is a sweet spot when it comes to the syntactic complexity of programming languages - too little and people get lost in the generality and abstractions, too much and its difficult to remember it all and you end up with coding standards desperately trying to close down on the features that should be used (e.g. banning the ternary conditional operator).

[oneandoneis2]

> Lisp has rather less syntax than most other programming languages - and that's possibly a weakness

Yup: it's like saying that binary is easier than decimal because it has less digits - the average Joe would still find it easier to do his maths in base ten :)

[mheathr]

Personally, I find both Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 easier to read (when it is pretty printed) than any other language syntax.

That the syntax or lack there of also expresses itself as an AST in addition to that is quite elegant.

Due to the reduction in syntax verbosity it is evident in the code what the important elements are as that is the only information displayed.

Lisp's syntax enables powerful utilities like Paredit to exploit that for unrivaled transpositions of the code as refactoring occurs.

I do think other syntax designs look more aesthetically pleasing on its face than what either Lisp-1 or Lisp-2 appear to the novice (the ML family of languages for instance) but it is something I have come to appreciate as my proficiency in Lisp has improved.

Code simultaneously being data and the converse as well is another elegant consequence of Lisp's design, so everything is optimized for the tail, which is what is important for tools and the environment to provide.

I wish the environment provided in other languages was as mature as that of Common Lisp (http://www.cliki.net/development), because it is immensely pleasurable to code in once the learning curve is overcome.

The quality of documentation and literature available for Lisp is also excellent, many of which are classics in Computer Science as a result and are worth reading regardless of actually using Lisp to develop with.

[alberich]

The comparison is not really valid. The point was that one has to spend "less" time to learn Lisp's syntax.

Thus, learning binary syntax vs. decimal syntax is indeed easier, as it is easier to learn Lisp's syntax when compared to other languages like, say, Java or C++.