C++ vs Lisp

[Robert Fraser]

Walter Bright wrote:
> An oldie, but some very thought provoking observations on what makes a 
> language productive:
> 
> http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~irenelg/courses/330/CTM/Resources/C++-vs-Lisp.txt 

Concise does not always mean readable, and reducing lines of code should 
*never* be a design goal. For example, if I removed many temporary 
variables and used long expressions (as is the style in many functional 
languages), I could probably chop off 1/5-1/4 of the LOC of my program, 
but debugging/fixing it would get much harder. Additionally, redundancy 
(as stated in the ";" topic) is not necessarily a bad thing as it helps 
reinforce meaning to readers.