cmu-infix

Lisp has several time phases that may or may not interleave, so yeah it can be confusing.. but keeping things simple and mostly only thinking about macros at compile time or read time can still go a long way. Ultimately an important and practical high level effect is macros let you create new syntax, not just computation at compile time to save some function calls at runtime. Want infix math? You can have infix math: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix Going crazy with lexical nesting (similar to callback hell, but imagine each callback needs to close over the environment it's called from, not just defined in)? A one-liner might help: https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html Want powerful looping constructs, powerful OOP, pattern matching, etc? Of course you can stick with simple macros that are little more than function wrapper

CL-INFIX [0] gives you infix syntax in Lisp a la carte. [0] https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix/blob/master/RE...

Lacking infix syntax out of the box is a problem, though not hard to add as a sibling mentioned; for those curious I like linking to this gem dating back to '93 since it's part of quicklisp now https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix The rest of the syntax being somewhat alien-ish is also a problem, but it goes away with practice. (https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png) But I don't think syntax alone is enough to explain Lisp's apparent languishing (though only apparent since it seems to be on the rise again), because we have Clojure. Clojure has the same syntax issues as Lisp (ok a bit fewer because of no reader macros and there's an argument that bracket variety is more pleasant to read) yet it's very popular all things considered. And because Clojure has a BDFL, if lacking infix OOTB was really an issue (I don't think it's

> How would you feel if Common Lisps suddenly started sporting infix operator notation? You mean like this? (I linked it the other day.) https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix But one might argue that the prefix notation + macros being able to support such a library is just further testament to their use as default...

Fortunately with Lisp this isn't an unsolvable problem. https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix