There’s no use arguing. As the ancient Lisp proverb says, when the programmer is ready, the parens will disappear. Until then, you’re just wasting your breath.
No because the syntax is so awful. Programming languages are consumed by machines but written by humans. You need to find a middle ground that works for both. That's (one of the reasons) why we don't all program in assembly any more.
Lisp and similar are just "hey it's really easy to write a parser if we just make all programmers write the AST directly!". Cool if the goal of your language is a really simple parser. Not so cool if you want to make it pleasant to read for humans.
I've never used a Lisp either, but I get the impression that "forcing you to write the AST" is sort of the secret sauce. That is, if your source code is basically an AST to begin with, then transforming that AST programmatically (i.e. macros) is much more ergonomic. So you do, which means that Lisp ends up operating at a higher level of abstraction than most languages because you can basically create DSL on the fly for whatever you're doing.
That's my impression, at least. Like I said, I've never actually used a Lisp. Maybe I'm put off by the smug superiority of so many Lisp people who presume that using Lisp makes them better at programming, smarter, and probably morally superior to me.
> Lisp and similar are just "hey it's really easy to write a parser if we just make all programmers write the AST directly!".
Its not just that, it makes syntax more uniform and it allows adding all sorts of features using the same parens syntax where other languages have to invent all sorts of special symbols to distinguish between things.
It makes it easier to parse for both machines and humans. This is why I asked if you ever wrote in lisps, because it takes some time to adjust but once you do it all makes sense.
Many languages tried to make programming look like a human-readable text, they all failed in one way or another. Because writing program instructions requires specific structure and s-expressions do that extremely well.
As someone who writes a lot of Scheme, I agree that the math syntax is not good. There have been proposals to add infix expressions (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-105/) but nobody seems to want them, or can agree on specifics.
However, code that is mostly function calls is fine for me, since those would have parentheses anyways in C++/Rust/whatever. In that case it makes the language more regular, which is nice for writing macros.
This view is false because what is hard to parse for machines also presents difficulty for humans.
We deal with most languages (Lisp family and not) via indentation, to indicate the major organization, so that there isn't a lot left to parse in a line of code, (unless someone wants to be "that" programmer).
drob518|8 days ago
IshKebab|8 days ago
Lisp and similar are just "hey it's really easy to write a parser if we just make all programmers write the AST directly!". Cool if the goal of your language is a really simple parser. Not so cool if you want to make it pleasant to read for humans.
TheFlyingFish|8 days ago
That's my impression, at least. Like I said, I've never actually used a Lisp. Maybe I'm put off by the smug superiority of so many Lisp people who presume that using Lisp makes them better at programming, smarter, and probably morally superior to me.
mapcars|7 days ago
Its not just that, it makes syntax more uniform and it allows adding all sorts of features using the same parens syntax where other languages have to invent all sorts of special symbols to distinguish between things.
It makes it easier to parse for both machines and humans. This is why I asked if you ever wrote in lisps, because it takes some time to adjust but once you do it all makes sense.
Many languages tried to make programming look like a human-readable text, they all failed in one way or another. Because writing program instructions requires specific structure and s-expressions do that extremely well.
pmcgoron|8 days ago
However, code that is mostly function calls is fine for me, since those would have parentheses anyways in C++/Rust/whatever. In that case it makes the language more regular, which is nice for writing macros.
I'd be curious to hear your opinion on wisp (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html) and the Readable project (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html) which are significant indentation syntaxes for Lisp languages that are still closely related to the AST and allow for easy macro writing.
Dansvidania|8 days ago
kazinator|8 days ago
We deal with most languages (Lisp family and not) via indentation, to indicate the major organization, so that there isn't a lot left to parse in a line of code, (unless someone wants to be "that" programmer).