It's not about survivorship bias, it's about notation. It's like "hating Leibniz's dy/dx because Newton's dot notation already exists" and I'm arguing that people don't just "hate the notation", they simply misunderstand the principles of calculus. I'm not saying that notation preferences don't have consequences, but in this case, I've seen far too often the evidence that programmers ignore the underlying ideas outright, simply because they didn't like the notation on first sight.
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> It's not about survivorship bias, it's about notation. It's like "hating Leibniz's dy/dx because Newton's dot notation already exists" and I'm arguing that people don't just "hate the notation", they simply misunderstand the principles of calculus.
Ok but where is the dot notation? If this is the only notation available for those ideas, how can you be sure that it's the ideas that are the problem and not the notation?
> I've seen far too often the evidence that programmers ignore the underlying ideas outright, simply because they didn't like the notation on first sight.
Then why are you opposed to people presenting the ideas with different notation, if the ideas are what you think is valuable?
> why are you opposed to people presenting the ideas with different notation
What are you talking about? I'm not opposed to anything, I don't know where that conclusion comes from. I'm just trying to explain why people hate s-expressions. Because of the unfamiliarity. I remember the time before I convinced myself to give Lisp a try - I'd look at it with all my previous knowledge of other programming languages and just didn't see it. I thought it was "unreadable", "weird", and had no merits in the "modern" world of computing. I was convinced that Lisp is archaic and there's no practical reason to use it. I was wrong on all counts. Learning Lisp and using it in real projects made me appreciate programming more, it taught me things that I haven't imagined before, my only regret that I didn't do it sooner.
> I'm not opposed to anything, I don't know where that conclusion comes from. I'm just trying to explain why people hate s-expressions.
You seemed to be implicitly claiming that there was no point presenting the ideas with a different syntax.
You're making very strident claims based on very little evidence. Maybe you're right, but I think we should at least entertain the possibility that people who think they hate s-expressions actually do hate s-expressions - which would be an ample explanation for why those people never got into Lisp.
I expanded on it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689592