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Lisp is sexy, but parenthesis are a really hard sell for the wide crowd. It sounds silly, but that's the reality. If they had forced people to learn & use Lisp

Lisp is sexy, but parenthesis are a really hard sell for the wide crowd. It sounds silly, but that's the reality. If they had forced people to learn & use Lisp instead of C, the world might be a very different place. I personally love them even now when I look back at Clojure code. Clojurescript is just wonderful. I'm not even sure a Haskell-like language that compiles to JavaScript (Elm, PureScript, GHCJS) with really good tooling can beat it, though I haven't tried. Would be an interesting experiment to do a comparison by writing the same app in all the languages.

_halgari 10y ago
And yet, Clojure has less parens than your average JS program. Even Java has more syntactic sugar. Just compare: foo.bar(baz) to: (.bar foo baz) Same number of parens...they're just in different places. Sure CommonLisp has a ton of parens, but thats CL and it has its own set of issues. One more example: Runnable foo = new Runnable() { Object run(Object bar) { return bar; } } vs (reify Runnable (run [bar] bar)) Less parens, no brackets, no semicolons, and no ceremony. This "parens are killing Clojure" meme is just a straw-man.