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"If you want code that's easy to understand and parse, go with LISP or whatever." I wouldn't agree with that. Lisp is trivial to parse, but precisely because of this--because it was created in a time when the knowledge of parsers and the principles behind building them effectively was still in its infancy, and so they punted and went with the most ridiculously simplistic thing that could possibly work--you don't get a lot of the syntactic benefits of modern languages. So it's easy to parse, but not at all easy to understand. There's a reason people call it "Lost In Superfluous Parentheses."

Mason Wheeler
– Mason Wheeler

2016-01-25 21:58:19 +00:00
Commented Jan 25, 2016 at 21:58
9

@MasonWheeler That's a matter of taste - C programmers called it that, not LISPers :P . Count the parentheses - there's about as many as in your typical C++ program. The real difference is their position (myFunc() versus (myFunc)), and that has a very good reason. LISP-based languages are still very popular, especially with math/physics people. The main thing is really that LISPy languages are very unfamiliar to modern C-style programmers - but that's hardly a reason to ignore it. Scheme, Clojure, and to an extent the ML-based languages (OCaml, F#...) are very LISPy indeed.

Luaan
– Luaan

2016-01-26 08:01:16 +00:00
Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 8:01
7

@Luaan I can tell you for certain that LISP is NOT popular in physics. The two dominant languages in the field are FORTRAN and C++. FORTRAN is 'popular' because so many old codes were written in it, but almost all the new programs are written in C++. As a research physicist, I have not once encountered or even heard of a LISP program. Not to say they don't exist, but the languages is definitely not popular.

James Matta
– James Matta

2016-01-26 19:13:41 +00:00
Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 19:13
5

@Luaan We may or may not need more software developers. We definitely don't need more CS graduates. That's like saying "we need more structural engineers, so we need more theoretical physics graduates."

mrr
– mrr

2016-01-26 20:36:52 +00:00
Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 20:36
4

@user1717828 It's to avoid the delightful effects of mistyping if (myField == null) as if (myField = null), which will compile just fine C/C++, but probably not do what you intended. On the other hand, if (null = myField) will throw an error, since you can't assign to a constant.

Wlerin
– Wlerin

2016-01-27 05:58:42 +00:00
Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 5:58

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