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That's why few people are using things like parinfer. I don't think this is true. I develop Cursive and I use it, despite being competent at paredit. A ton of

That's why few people are using things like parinfer. I don't think this is true. I develop Cursive and I use it, despite being competent at paredit. A ton of my users do too, even experienced ones. It's just easier, and it turns out that a lot of editing is actually line based, even in a lisp. And when it's not, I can still use the paredit commands in parinfer mode, at least with Cursive. It's referenced in an edit to noctuid's document, but many of those criticisms are no longer valid since smart mode became the de-facto default for parinfer. It's now really intuitive. Parinfer's worst problem now is its difficulty inferring parens when there are multiple expressions on a line (i.e. when there's no indentation to infer from), but it's surprising how infrequently that's actually a problem.

dragandj 8y ago
What percentage of users is that, assuming that you don't make parinfer the default choice in your IDE? What percentage of Cursive users knowingly say: I'm a bit confused by how these parens work (my guess: all lisp newcomers), what percentage goes to preferences to see what they can do about it (my educated guess: a lot, but less than, say, a third), and what percentage of those conciously look for parinfer (I don't know - I'm asking)? Now, Cursive is used by something like a third of Clojure users. Half of them use Emacs, and in Emacs land there are rather few Clojurians who seek something like parinfer. Even when they do, it's a usual "how we can make this more palatable to outsiders" type of quest rather than "I'm really frustrated by how Emacs does Lisp editing. I'd like something like parinfer"...
- lemming 8y ago
  I don't know exact numbers, since I don't do any user tracking. But I know of numerous users who are already experienced with Clojure who have switched, myself included. Cursive currently has paredit on by default, but I'm going to switch that to parinfer. FWIW Emacs users do ask about parinfer in #parinfer on Clojurians because they actually want to use it. There currently isn't a smart mode for Emacs though, and that's what I consider the game changer. I suspect that uptake will be good once that's available.
  - dragandj 8y ago
    If so many people find parinfer valuable, maybe they should consider donating some money to Shaun.
noctuid 8y ago
Paredit is really not the closest or best comparison. If you want simplicity, lispy is often simpler than or at least as simple as parinfer. At the same time, it's more powerful than paredit. Even if you never used its special keybindings, I'd argue that lispy is more intuitive and has more useful default keybindings. The indentation-based inference doesn't add anything major as far as I can tell; it seems to just cause unnecessary problems. I think parinfer is more popular in editors besides Emacs because of the lack of alternatives more than anything else.

dragandj 8y ago

What percentage of users is that, assuming that you don't make parinfer the default choice in your IDE? What percentage of Cursive users knowingly say: I'm a bit confused by how these parens work (my guess: all lisp newcomers), what percentage goes to preferences to see what they can do about it (my educated guess: a lot, but less than, say, a third), and what percentage of those conciously look for parinfer (I don't know - I'm asking)? Now, Cursive is used by something like a third of Clojure users. Half of them use Emacs, and in Emacs land there are rather few Clojurians who seek something like parinfer. Even when they do, it's a usual "how we can make this more palatable to outsiders" type of quest rather than "I'm really frustrated by how Emacs does Lisp editing. I'd like something like parinfer"...

lemming 8y ago
I don't know exact numbers, since I don't do any user tracking. But I know of numerous users who are already experienced with Clojure who have switched, myself included. Cursive currently has paredit on by default, but I'm going to switch that to parinfer. FWIW Emacs users do ask about parinfer in #parinfer on Clojurians because they actually want to use it. There currently isn't a smart mode for Emacs though, and that's what I consider the game changer. I suspect that uptake will be good once that's available.
- dragandj 8y ago
  If so many people find parinfer valuable, maybe they should consider donating some money to Shaun.

noctuid 8y ago

Paredit is really not the closest or best comparison. If you want simplicity, lispy is often simpler than or at least as simple as parinfer. At the same time, it's more powerful than paredit. Even if you never used its special keybindings, I'd argue that lispy is more intuitive and has more useful default keybindings. The indentation-based inference doesn't add anything major as far as I can tell; it seems to just cause unnecessary problems. I think parinfer is more popular in editors besides Emacs because of the lack of alternatives more than anything else.