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The odd thing about the fully parenthesized syntax is that it's offputting at first, but once you've been doing it for a little while, in an editor that does pa

The odd thing about the fully parenthesized syntax is that it's offputting at first, but once you've been doing it for a little while, in an editor that does parenthesis matching and auto-indentation, it gets to be just as easy and pleasant to work with as more common languages, or even more so. (Packages like Emacs 'paredit' make it even better. (I haven't tried 'parinfer'.)) I understand this is hard to believe if you haven't tried it, and it certainly does take some getting used to. Lisp is, in short, an acquired taste. Think of it like very spicy food: many people avoid it, but those of us who like it, like it a lot.

dreamcompiler 9y ago
Completely agree. Lisp code I wrote 10 years ago is still very readable to me. It makes perfect sense once you're "over the hump" but you gotta make that investment. Contrast this with Forth, which I was at one time equally expert at, and where I could rarely read my own code 10 days later.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  The biggest reasons for this are local variables vs. stack ops and parenthesized expressions vs. having to know the arities of the words called. You can add local variables to Forth, but afaik nobody did during its heyday; and "phrasing" your code with whitespace can help some on the latter issue, but it's admittedly not as explicit as parens. (From another one-time Forther and more recent Lisper.)
  - dreamcompiler 9y ago
    Mach 2 Forth for the Mac in the late 80s had local variables and when I wrote a Forth compiler for the TI 34010 I included local variables. They helped a lot, but they still don't make Forth as readable as Lisp.
Fice 9y ago
> Packages like Emacs 'paredit' make it even better. Not just better — it's a leap from editing code as plain sequence of lines of characters to editing code structurally. And lisp syntax enables complete and uniform structural editing across all contexts from simple arithmetic expressions to complex top-level definitions.

dreamcompiler 9y ago

Completely agree. Lisp code I wrote 10 years ago is still very readable to me. It makes perfect sense once you're "over the hump" but you gotta make that investment. Contrast this with Forth, which I was at one time equally expert at, and where I could rarely read my own code 10 days later.

abecedarius 9y ago
The biggest reasons for this are local variables vs. stack ops and parenthesized expressions vs. having to know the arities of the words called. You can add local variables to Forth, but afaik nobody did during its heyday; and "phrasing" your code with whitespace can help some on the latter issue, but it's admittedly not as explicit as parens. (From another one-time Forther and more recent Lisper.)
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  Mach 2 Forth for the Mac in the late 80s had local variables and when I wrote a Forth compiler for the TI 34010 I included local variables. They helped a lot, but they still don't make Forth as readable as Lisp.

Fice 9y ago

> Packages like Emacs 'paredit' make it even better. Not just better — it's a leap from editing code as plain sequence of lines of characters to editing code structurally. And lisp syntax enables complete and uniform structural editing across all contexts from simple arithmetic expressions to complex top-level definitions.