>>4There's a similar opposition between the use of lists to represent things and the use of "objects" with named, typed fields. I went through a stage, after I'd been programming in Lisp for 2 or 3 years, where I thought the old way of using lists to represent everything was just a hack. If you needed to represent points, surely it was better to declare a proper structure with x and y fields than to use a list of two numbers. Lists could contain anything. They might even have varying numbers of elements.
I was wrong. Those are the advantages of using lists to represent points.
Over the years my appreciation for lists has increased. In exploratory programming, the fact that it's unclear what a list represents is an advantage, because you yourself are unclear about what type of program you're trying to write. The most important thing is not to constrain the evolution of your ideas. So the less you commit yourself in writing to what your data structures represent, the better.