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My guess is that what people complain about isn't really the parentheses, but rather heavy nesting of Lisp programs compared to other languages. If parentheses

by tung 16y ago

My guess is that what people complain about isn't really the parentheses, but rather heavy nesting of Lisp programs compared to other languages. If parentheses were replaced with something else, they'd probably complain about that something else.

KirinDave 16y ago
Except that most modern lisps don't even nest that deeply anymore. At least, not anymore than every functional language that uses nesting to offer new immutable lexical scopes does. Seriously, the average nesting depth of a C program is maybe 3-4 (function, conditional, loop, etc), and C programs are simple. More complex languages like Java and C++ will easily have 4-7 levels of nesting on average. Clojure and Arc code are probably right on par with that.
- gtani 16y ago
  What happens when a VP of Engineering decides that Cyclomatic complexity will be capped at 10: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105852/conditional-logging-with-minimal-cyclomatic-complexity http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105852/conditional-loggin...
  - KirinDave 16y ago
    It seems pointless to mandate it, but I don't think it'd really cause a problem for most real-world clojure programs. For one, cyclomatic complexicty measures independent paths, and I don't think that's what most people are complaining about when they say "lisp has too many parenthesis". They're complaining about how the structures expected require a lot of (sometimes arduous-seeming) complexity. Indeed, I suspect that the cyclomatic complexity of an average lisp function will be less than that of, say, the average Python function. It'd be the same with any functional language; they encourage you to only have one or two conditionals per function.
wtracy 16y ago
Indeed. It took me a long time to get used to this in functional programming, and I got annoyed with how deeply nested my code got. Then I learned that it was just the language telling me to decompose my functions! :-)

by tung 16y ago

KirinDave 16y ago

Except that most modern lisps don't even nest that deeply anymore. At least, not anymore than every functional language that uses nesting to offer new immutable lexical scopes does. Seriously, the average nesting depth of a C program is maybe 3-4 (function, conditional, loop, etc), and C programs are simple. More complex languages like Java and C++ will easily have 4-7 levels of nesting on average. Clojure and Arc code are probably right on par with that.

gtani 16y ago
What happens when a VP of Engineering decides that Cyclomatic complexity will be capped at 10: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105852/conditional-logging-with-minimal-cyclomatic-complexity http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105852/conditional-loggin...
- KirinDave 16y ago
  It seems pointless to mandate it, but I don't think it'd really cause a problem for most real-world clojure programs. For one, cyclomatic complexicty measures independent paths, and I don't think that's what most people are complaining about when they say "lisp has too many parenthesis". They're complaining about how the structures expected require a lot of (sometimes arduous-seeming) complexity. Indeed, I suspect that the cyclomatic complexity of an average lisp function will be less than that of, say, the average Python function. It'd be the same with any functional language; they encourage you to only have one or two conditionals per function.

wtracy 16y ago

Indeed. It took me a long time to get used to this in functional programming, and I got annoyed with how deeply nested my code got. Then I learned that it was just the language telling me to decompose my functions! :-)