it's just not a very intelligent argument, and can probably safely be dismissed as merely uninformed.
Do you mean that people who hate lisp because of its parentheses are uninformed; or do you mean that thinking that this is the reason people hate lisp is uninformed? The first is about languages; the second is
about people.
Assuming the latter, what's the evidence? Many people complain about parentheses, so it seems that it is an active reason, but without a rigorous survey ("Why do you hate lisp?"), it's hard to know.
The issue with parentheses is not about "hate" at all, but confusion. If you are 100% determined to learn something no matter what, you can probably learn it. But in reality, when you start to learn something, you are also assessing if it is worth the effort of learning.
The context of my first experience with lisp was that it was supposed to be more "mathematical" than other languages - and so I assumed the parentheses were used as they are in expressions, that is, for grouping. But they aren't used in that way in Lisp - they mean function call, like f(x), but with yet another syntax. So, my 5 minute cursory foray into Lisp ended with me concluding that Lisp was unexpectedly inconsistent. Since that's against my usability values, I didn't spend further time on it (since then, I have spent further time).
I didn't hate the parentheses; I just found their meaning elusive.
Do you mean that people who hate lisp because of its parentheses are uninformed; or do you mean that thinking that this is the reason people hate lisp is uninformed?
Both, actually. But moreso the folks who complain about parentheses. I suspect that anyone who uses that as their reason for not learning or liking Lisp simply would never consider Lisp long enough to know anything more about the language. I just think it's more likely because they like "industry standard" languages, and have no obvious on-the-job use for Lisp, but they don't want to say "I am intellectually incurious about languages and different programming paradigms". I think those same people would never learn Lua or Haskell, despite a distinct lack of crazy parentheses.
Many people complain about parentheses
Many people complain about significant whitespace in Python and sigils in Perl. Either one has orders of magnitude more developers and more code being written in it on a daily basis. It is a triviality, and the kind of folks who pick out trivialities to complain about are not the kind of folks you can convert. They're not going to learn your favorite language, unless you make it look exactly like their favorite language. Since Lisp can't look like Java or C# or C or Visual Basic or PHP, without losing a lot of what makes Lisp Lisp, that's not a useful pursuit.
So, I'm simply saying that talking over parentheses over and over again is ignoring the real problems and focusing on the one that everyone knows won't change. It's a perfect flame war talking point, but it's not what's keeping people away from Lisp.
Yes, I can see parentheses as a convenient catch-phrase. While it's less familiar than indentation in Python, you're right that people complain about that too, but it hasn't stopped adoption.
Unfortunately, I think the community is about as likely to change.
Do you mean that people who hate lisp because of its parentheses are uninformed; or do you mean that thinking that this is the reason people hate lisp is uninformed? The first is about languages; the second is about people.
Assuming the latter, what's the evidence? Many people complain about parentheses, so it seems that it is an active reason, but without a rigorous survey ("Why do you hate lisp?"), it's hard to know.
The issue with parentheses is not about "hate" at all, but confusion. If you are 100% determined to learn something no matter what, you can probably learn it. But in reality, when you start to learn something, you are also assessing if it is worth the effort of learning.
The context of my first experience with lisp was that it was supposed to be more "mathematical" than other languages - and so I assumed the parentheses were used as they are in expressions, that is, for grouping. But they aren't used in that way in Lisp - they mean function call, like f(x), but with yet another syntax. So, my 5 minute cursory foray into Lisp ended with me concluding that Lisp was unexpectedly inconsistent. Since that's against my usability values, I didn't spend further time on it (since then, I have spent further time).
I didn't hate the parentheses; I just found their meaning elusive.