Hacker News

It's not unreasonable to dislike coding in s-expression syntax. It is not very readable.

There's a reason the vast majority of programming languages (especially weighted by popularity) use more traditional syntax.

iLemming 4 hours ago [ - ]

> It is not very readable.

That holds true only for two cases:

- For a programmer who never learned Lisp as their first language. I have met people who learned Clojure as their very first PL and they said it was fun. Later there were utterly confused about Java, Python and Javascript. Going the opposite may feel confusing and identity-breaking.

- Reading static code. In a sense, it can be a bit harder to read a wall of Lisp, say printed on paper. Lispers typically don't inspect "dead code" like that; they'd connect to the live REPL and eval expressions on the go, programming it from "inside out". With experience, it becomes easier to scan the code and mentally parse it. Lisp at that point actually gets far more readable than any other PL. For instance, Lisp code is better suited for smaller screens of smartphones - the code wraps around yet retains its readability. Try that trick with literally any other language, I can 100% guarantee - most of them would look like a huge pile of indecipherable mess.

IshKebab 2 hours ago [ - ]

> For a programmer who never learned Lisp as their first language

Maybe. But I have never heard anyone say that Python is hard to read, and it's one of the most common complaints against Lisps. Just looking at them both it's hard to imagine how one could seriously believe that s-expressions are more readable. `(== a b)` is clearly worse than `a == b`. Even JavaScript programmers know that.

> they'd connect to the live REPL

Yeah I dunno this is the same cop-out Ruby programmers use to justify its lack of static typing. It's fundamentally better if you can understand code without having to run it.

evdubs 2 hours ago [ - ]

> `(== a b)` is clearly worse than `a == b`

It's clearly worse just because it moved from infix to prefix and is wrapped by parens? Is `(* (+ a b) (+ c d))` clearly worse than `(a + b) * (c + d);`? Both have a bunch of parens, and one even has a semi colon.

This works both ways. `(list 1 2 3)` is clearly better than:

        var l = new List();
        l.add(1);
        l.add(2);
        l.add(3);

It's also better than `var l = [1, 2, 3];`

How often are you trying to make sense of a bunch of infix arithmetic operations when you're programming? Separately, how often are you creating data structures, navigating data structures, handling data in the form of JSON or XML, parsing that data into your language's native data structures, etc.?

Reading arithmetic in prefix instead of infix is easy, even if it is counter to how you were taught in elementary school. Working with s-expressions for code and data is clearly better than whatever syntax your language uses for code and either directly instantiating data or reaching for JSON or XML.

> justify its lack of static typing

Racket has both Typed/Racket as well as contracts.

iLemming 33 minutes ago [ - ]

[dead]