[Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 02:29:33PM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
> David Roundy wrote:
> > > Bearing this in mind, and hoping you can see where I'm coming from, I
> > > think my question is: shouldn't you guys be using Lisp?
> > 
> > Lisp is impure, weakly typed and has way too many parentheses.  Why
> > would we use lisp? It seems to be lacking almost all the advantages of
> > Haskell, and have an ugly, inflexible syntax to boot.
> 
> The ability to dynamically generate, manipulate and analyse code in a
> structured manner provides a flexibility which is unmatched by any
> other language I know of.

True, if you want to write code to modify code, lisp would be nice
(everything is a list)... but that's related to my problem with its syntax.
Lisp seems to be designed for machines to parse easily without regard to
ease of human parsing.  That seems backwards to me.  On one level, an
objection to syntax is pretty lame, but on the other hand,

CAVEAT: I know nothing about lisp macros... my lisp knowledge is basically
from one course over ten years ago, plus some experience with configuring
emacs and with a photonics code (mpb) that used guile for its input files.
-- 
David Roundy