You're displaying what many people call the "Lisp Programmer's Disease". The symptoms are noting that good mathematical representations (like prefix) are extremely important (they aren't always), that recursion is better than iteration (it isn't objectively better), and that purity of syntax is a goal instead of a tool.

The Lambda Calculus is very elegant and very mathematically pure. Most computers, fundamentally, are von Neumann machines. The programs they run are not always so tidy as the Lambda Calculus, and the Lambda Calculus is often quite an inefficient way to represent a solution to a problem for those machines.

Many languages map better to a DFA or an NFA than to the Lambda Calculus. Some map better to propositional calculus. Some are written for data-flow machines or to emulate data-flow machines. While it's possible to have a Turing-complete language based on any of these models which can approximate one another, it's difficult to say that one is the true model of programming.

In the future, when concurrency is even more important than it is now, languages which do not impose artificial ordering upon the operations involved will be more important. Lisp, Haskell, and similar languages will certainly be handy for that. So will Prolog, any data-flow language, and well-written distributed object systems.

All that said, most people don't want to think about parentheses and order of operations when they first start programming. They want to see how to handle simple cases of input and output. That's something Perl excels at, and Lisp (at least Common Lisp and Scheme) make kind of clunky.

In reply to Re^2: Perl as one's first programming language by mr_mischief
in thread Perl as one's first programming language by amarquis

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