Look at this line of code:

processCustomerOrder ( customer , orderItems )

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Any developer with six months of experience knows roughly what that does. The name is explicit, the structure is familiar, the intent is readable. Now look at this:

( reduce + ( map f xs ))

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The reaction most developers have is immediate and unfavourable. Parentheses everywhere. No obvious structure. It looks less like a programming language and more like a typographer's accident. The old joke writes itself: LISP stands for Lost In Stupid Parentheses.

That joke is, technically, a backronym. John McCarthy named it LISP as a contraction of LISt Processing when he created it in 1958. The sardonic expansion came later, coined by programmers who had opinions about the aesthetic choices involved.…