It's the lists.
No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists.
Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this), you still have to be able to read and reason about the many parts of the language designed for, as the old quip had it, prothething lithts.
The "weird looking syntax" does not help, but Lisp hackers are right that you get used to that part, might even appreciate it if macros are something you really care about. Structural editing a la paredit and parinfer are pretty nice too.
But when it comes with a weird way of programming, that's a bridge too far for a lot of people. It's harder to learn, read, and reason about, for longer than most languages.
I'm glad they mentioned Julia though. Learned everything Dylan had to teach and then some, real treat of a language, and, it turns out, writing macros without cons cells is rather pleasant and powerful. Certainly an acceptable Lisp in my book. Maybe someday they'll add conditions and restarts, that's the one feature CL which gives it an edge on Julia.
No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists.
Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this), you still have to be able to read and reason about the many parts of the language designed for, as the old quip had it, prothething lithts.
The "weird looking syntax" does not help, but Lisp hackers are right that you get used to that part, might even appreciate it if macros are something you really care about. Structural editing a la paredit and parinfer are pretty nice too.
But when it comes with a weird way of programming, that's a bridge too far for a lot of people. It's harder to learn, read, and reason about, for longer than most languages.
I'm glad they mentioned Julia though. Learned everything Dylan had to teach and then some, real treat of a language, and, it turns out, writing macros without cons cells is rather pleasant and powerful. Certainly an acceptable Lisp in my book. Maybe someday they'll add conditions and restarts, that's the one feature CL which gives it an edge on Julia.