Comment by ralphc
15 days ago
I don't know if it's innate but it's what we have. Lisp has been around about as long as programming, it's had plenty of time to catch on, it hasn't.
Maybe innate, maybe it's an offshoot of teaching math in an infix style, 1 + 2 vs. + 1 2.
I don't think it's been tested at all. for people who took and finished a course in Lisp as their first programming language, how many "hate parens"?
I have no trouble with lisp's parens, i like them. What I never liked though, is that the first item in the list was an operator, a verb lets say, and the rest were the nouns; whereas, you could also have nested lists say of numbers where there were no operators. Never felt right (not that I can think of a better way, not worth adding more parens)
But good college math departments teach reverse Polish notation; i.e., Hewlett-Packard over Texas Instruments. It’s demonstrably more advanced / efficient.
Lisp became very popular, then died off rapidly due to association with the AI Winter.