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> you're talking from the perspective of an experienced lisper. If I am an experienced Common Lisper, it is because I was once a noob Common Lisper and already

by junke 10y ago

> you're talking from the perspective of an experienced lisper. If I am an experienced Common Lisper, it is because I was once a noob Common Lisper and already not bothered by syntax. Maybe that's because I already had experience with several other languages, which have all some superficial negative aspects. That being said, I prefer to use CL but I don't mind using Clojure. > either you deal with complexity or your users will have to. I did not say the complexity was necessary present in one case or another. Biased as I am, I see no complexity with a simple, regular usage of parenthesis. Brackets and braces are good in the eye of other kind of people, sure. > that is the whole point of the thread - why hasn't lisp caught on, and i'm an example of both failure and success in that regard. Well, should we generalize from your example then, when it is not appropriate to do so in my case? Besides, I was mostly responding to your posts about literal values.

keymone 10y ago
> Biased as I am, I see no complexity with a simple, regular usage of parenthesis. > If I am an experienced Common Lisper, it is because I was once a noob Common Lisper > should we generalize from your example then, when it is not appropriate to do so in my case if we do so carefully? obviously there is some spectrum of how mentally exhausting various aspects of language's syntax are for people, and how prepared/willing different people are to wrap their heads around those aspects. crude analogy would be saying unary number system is better than decimal because it's simpler (via having less "things"), all operations are more intuitive and there is no complexity in dealing with all those digits. just as we use decimal instead because we have physiological reasons to do so, it's not outlandish to suppose that we have psychological reasons to prefer syntax that is more rich than what CL provides out of the box but also not too rich because it's mentally exhausting. clojure seems to be hitting the sweet spot(at least within lisps family) and while many factors are at work here, the evidence is that clojure quickly became more popular than cl. to be clear, i'm not saying here that popular = better, of course.

by junke 10y ago

keymone 10y ago

> Biased as I am, I see no complexity with a simple, regular usage of parenthesis. > If I am an experienced Common Lisper, it is because I was once a noob Common Lisper > should we generalize from your example then, when it is not appropriate to do so in my case if we do so carefully? obviously there is some spectrum of how mentally exhausting various aspects of language's syntax are for people, and how prepared/willing different people are to wrap their heads around those aspects. crude analogy would be saying unary number system is better than decimal because it's simpler (via having less "things"), all operations are more intuitive and there is no complexity in dealing with all those digits. just as we use decimal instead because we have physiological reasons to do so, it's not outlandish to suppose that we have psychological reasons to prefer syntax that is more rich than what CL provides out of the box but also not too rich because it's mentally exhausting. clojure seems to be hitting the sweet spot(at least within lisps family) and while many factors are at work here, the evidence is that clojure quickly became more popular than cl. to be clear, i'm not saying here that popular = better, of course.