note by Christopher Allan Webber

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-04-02T22:16:49Z

I know a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in lisps but left because of lack of libraries. I don't know any because of parentheses.

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Functional languages are not particularly intuitive to many beginners, unless those beginners fall out of math and into programming. That is a huge hurdle for gaining widespread adoption, isn't it?

Douglas Perkins at 2016-04-03T07:48:01Z

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@Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) Yes I think Guile and Guix and Clojure are all improving the situation. It also hleps that they haven't "started" with people bitter about Lisp not catching on in the 80s/90s, or Paul Graham style lispertarians.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-04-03T13:07:09Z

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"lispertarians" : )

j1mc at 2016-04-03T14:34:50Z

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In my view, as CL and Scheme are not pure functional, they're not alien enough to scare beginners for that reason. No monad deterrent. My fellow SICP students, several of whom were not already programmers, most of which had never done functional programming, had no problem following the curriculum.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-04-03T14:45:57Z

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