4 ms·

How can you call lisp an inaccessible language? It has less syntax than anything else. It is as simple as a language gets.

• kryptiskt 9y ago
  Brainfuck has even simpler syntax and is even more inaccessible. There's way more to languages than syntax.
  • edem 9y ago
    Brainfuck it unintuitive, but Lisp is. You can learn the lambda calculus in 10 minutes. You can'c tompare the two.
• 201709User 9y ago
  It's better to have 50 keywords than 1000 nested brackets.
  • empthought 9y ago
    Personally I don't see the advantage of )}]]})} over ))))))).
    • kazinator 9y ago
      It's more time consuming to close )}]]})}. With ))) we just repeatedly type ))) until the cursor jumps to the target opening paren we are trying to close. With a mixture of different parens we have to interrupt what we are doing and determine the correct parens which will continue the closing sequence.
      • flavio81 9y ago
        >With ))) we just repeatedly type ))) until the cursor jumps to the target opening paren we are trying to close. Exactly. Or, the IDE can close all the parens for you: SLIME command "slime-close-all-parens-in-sexp", which you can map to whatever key combination you want.
  • Udik 9y ago
    I think there are people who value completeness- they enjoy working on systems with many rules tailored for specific use cases, and like accumulating knowledge about which rule is the correct one to apply in each situation; and there are people who value open-endedness- systems that have few simple rules that can be combined to obtain novel and unexpected results, even if these are not as optimized as they could be in a more complete system. I picture the difference as that between a role playing game and chess: complex, domain-specific rules on one side, simple and abstract rules on the other.
  • edem 9y ago
    Not really. You can't comment on this until you tried a lisp. I know that you haven't tried it because if you had you would have known about paredit and how it solves the paren problem.
• hoorayimhelping 9y ago
  How many stack overflow questions and answers are there for lisp(s)? How many for Java? How many applications on the web are written in a lisp? How many are written in Java (or Python or Ruby or PHP)? There's a lot more to accessibility than how easy the syntax is to grok. This is just one simple and limited example.
  • flavio81 9y ago
    >How many stack overflow questions and answers are there for lisp Yet there are a ton of books written about Lisp in all kinds of topics and applications. Not to mention really well-written tutorials like "Practical Common Lisp". Plus, the documentation/reference of the language itself is comprehensive and well written, comparing favorably to the documentation for most programming languages out there.
  • flavio81 9y ago
    >How many applications on the web are written in a lisp? You are using one right now: Hacker News is written on a Lisp: Arc. Also, the first HTTP 1.1 compliant server and used by the W3C to debug the HTTP 1.1 reference implementation, was written in Common Lisp.