[chrisduesing]

I do. There is a reason for the success of Ruby and Python, and why Elixir is dragging Erlang in to the present. It turns out you don't just have to write your language in the shape of the machine/vm but it can be a tool conformed to the mind of the programmer. "princ" is not easy to remember, read or associate to other things one already knows. The point of a project like this should not be to save old school programmers (who won't use it anyway) a few keystrokes, it is to throw away the cruft of decades of "a very good reason" decisions for something simpler and better thought out.

I really like the direction of this project, but I agree with the parent comment, it doesn't go far enough.

[rudiger]

Erlang, despite its fusty syntax, already feels like the future for anyone using it.

[bad_user]

I don't know German, but I have a huntch that Romanian, my native language, is more complex than German, except that Romanian has firm roots in latin, therefore more people unfamiliar with both will have an easier time with Romanian, since we have a significant portion of our vocabulary similar to Italian or Spanish, plus we borrowed words from French, along with many neologisms coming straight from English. Just because a language is unfamiliar, that does not make it hard or complex, just because you're not speaking it.

Consequently, just because a language seems superficially familiar, that doesn't make it easy to learn - for programming languages it takes weeks to understand the basic necessities, whereas it takes years to become a master, regardless of the programming language you're talking about.

Also, Erlang's Prolog-like syntax sucks, not because it's unfamiliar, but because it objectively sucks.

[chaoky]

This. Arguing that Common Lisp sucks because the names of functions are not sufficiently python/C/Algol-like is like arguing Chinese languages are never going to become widely accepted because they aren't sufficiently like European languages. People who argue against car/cdr are the same people who will blindly accept printf, strlen, scanf (wtf?), __le__, zip. They accept those names because they actually learned the language and discovered those were trivial details and don't judge something so superficially. (also, ~95% of common lisp names are more like with-open-file, or define-setf-expansion, or make-load-form, or most-positive-float, or standard-input, instead of, what mkStr, <stdin>, isalnum, fprintf, ? :, and the like)

[Retra]

Familiarity makes it easier to learn, not easy. Just as long as you don't betray anyone's expectations about what they already know.

I remember struggling with Haskell because there is a function called 'nub', which wasn't anywhere near what I would have called the function if I had named it. Hoogle says "(The name nub means `essence'.)" In Lisp it is called 'remove-duplicates.' In Python it is list(set(x)). In SQL it is 'select distinct.'

So what advantage does nub pose? Not one of clarity, but of convenience for those "in the know." (Which is not those who are learning the language.)