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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

Why not? Is "the average developer" hampered by some neurodevelopmental deficit?

How come the freedom in naming of functions and data doesn't have the same effect?

If you disagree that Lisp has a tendency to become unreadable then maybe the typical developer might have a "neurodevelopmental deficit" compared to you. bindings don't change the language that's executing. That's the entire point why Macros can quickly make code unreadable.

Macros do not change the language that is executing (as in self-modifying code).

Self-modifying code is possible to express by other means in traditional Lisps that have a quote operator.

In Common Lisp, it is undefined behavior to modify a quoted part of the program.

E.g. this wold be undefined:

  (defun counter () (inc (car '(1))))

The function is referring to a piece of its own syntax (1) which initially holds the integer 1 and incrementing that. This may have the expected effect under some circumstances. Or it could have the expected effect, plus some unexpected effect, or not have the expected effect at all. It may signal an error, also.

You can easily write unreadable Java code. So what?

stack overflow syndrome?

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