But when it happens it's a nasty death, and leaves a sour taste in the mouth of both those who are pro- and against- the said technology.

Those that "die" are upset because they bought into the technology, invested time and energy into it, it didn't work out. BUT not because of one single reason, but because a whole lot of small ones. It's frustrating to explain to someone why it didn't work because there isn't one or two reasons -- it turns into a long list of small claims that sound silly individually and makes the one making them seem whinny and complaining for no reason...

And this gets the supporters of the technology upset. They see others baselessly attacking their favorite tool.

EDIT: A prime example of this was the GNU/Linux desktop. New users would try it, it kinda worked, except when it didn't. Major things were "ok" but many small things were not polished. And the Linux geeks just heard a lot of small complains and couldn't understand why everyone "hates" GNU/Linux for no apparent reason.

I wasn't invalidating the criticisms themselves actually. I was suggesting that there were a lot of repeat criticisms that we all know and hear all the time. 80% of the page are the same criticisms of syntax, keyword names, prefix notation, and structures. One could probably reduce the length of the page by a significant amount if they just replaced it all with a single <ul>.

The criticisms of Lisp are nothing new. The language has been around for a dogs age. There are going to be people who will never like parens or silly keywords like cons, car, and cdr. Personally I find it equally silly when they claim such superficial reasons are why Lisp is a terrible language. Every language has to deal with some amount of this weak argument. Lisp is no different, so I have no qualms with the argument itself.

If Lisp doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. It's no reason for "hate". :p

I was addressing more the type of a death by 1000 cuts and how it is a very frustrating experience on both sides. I personally don't have experience to make a judgement either way on Lisp.

But your comment illustrates the general point I was making. You say that there is no reason to hate Lisp.. It seems there is a perception that un-informed and plain ignorant amateurs hate your favorite tool for no apparent reason. However a death by a 1000 cuts occurs after someone has bought into the technology and gave it a try. They invest time in it, but eventually it doesn't work out. And that's the thing, there is no good _one_ reason why it doesn't work out. It is a lot of small ones. The parens, lack of a single comprehensive library package, the syntax, and so on. All silly stupid reasons. It is pathetic to enumerate them and it is frustrating to hear them enumerated and that's the reason I called this a nasty "death".

I never said there was no reason to hate Lisp. Just that the majority of reasons that people give are not good ones. Hate is infectious and thrives on ignorance to propagate. The fact that the 'hate page' is more than twice as long as the 'love' page while 80% of the hate page is full of redundant arguments about syntax just goes to show that most people making these arguments really have no case to merit them.

I distinguish 'dislike' from 'hate' because the former is a more informed position. If one knew enough about Lisp to understand it's merits, but still couldn't produce useful software with it; they would have a reason to dislike it. But it's hard to hate something that has real merit if you actually understand it. You cannot hate the fact that compiled Lisp is pretty fast for example. That's a good thing.

Lisp itself doesn't do much of anything poorly. It just may be that your personal preferences prevent you from taking advantage of it. That's still not a bad thing on Lisp's part.

So you see, while there may be a thousand little reasons a person can find that keeps them from liking and using Lisp; it doesn't make Lisp itself a bad language. Lisp has proven itself a great language. Just as C is a great language, and Java, etc.

So I think someone should run through the hate page and compress it down to the core arguments so people can get a better idea of what's going on.