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Last week I tried writing a new Love2d mode for Emacs in Emacs Lisp, but it was on Windows so my muscle memory for Paredit wasn't helpful. Editing s-expressions

Last week I tried writing a new Love2d mode for Emacs in Emacs Lisp, but it was on Windows so my muscle memory for Paredit wasn't helpful. Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. Last night I wrote the same plugin for VS Code which used JavaScript, and naturally it was effortless. It got me thinking about how s-expressions are inherently hostile to non-customized setups, whereas JavaScript just uses arrow keys. A former employer was led by huge Clojure fans, who requested that the backend be Clojure, and highly encouraged me to use ClojureScript and something like Reagent for the front-end, which I recently noticed that they finished after my departure. But the more I think about it, the more I can't think of a single feature of ClojureScript that's inherently better than JavaScript, whereas s-expressions are inherently hostile and also have no real-world benefits. JavaScript has destructuring, closures, a flexible module system, object/array spread, basically every syntactical feature Clojure has, but without the s-expressions. The commonly touted benefit of s-expressions is homoiconicity (code is data), which lets the developer customize the language via macros without needing to wait on the compiler/interpreter authors. But we have this exact same benefit in JavaScript with compilers like Babel. Maybe it's pushed onto another layer of development, but it's in no way less legitimate or useful. The slight benefit you get by being able to do this transformation at runtime is negated by the inconvenience of s-expressions. (Although at first glance, it seems like we could use a better Babel API that lets us transform our code more conveniently. But I think they're working on that?) The main other benefit I commonly see from people using Clojure or ClojureScript is live development. I saw technomancy made some blog posts about how he used Fennel (a Lisp that compiles to Lua) to do live-coding stuff in Love2d. I was impressed, until I realized that none of these features were specific to Lisp. So I borrowed the same underlying concept he utilized, and started to make a really cool Love2d live development thing just like he had, but in pure Lua. Now I have the ability to press Cmd-E in VS Code while editing some Lua file, and if I have any code selected, it'll be sent to the live Lovd2d game that's running, to be eval'd, and if there's no selection, the whole current file will be sent. It's the coolest setup ever, almost identical to the awesome setup I had with CIDER + Clojure + Emacs, but without Emacs or s-expressions.

nudpiedo 7y ago
The UI of an S-Expeession and a compiler transformation parse time transformation is just out of any comparison. Most of projects wouldn’t even consider writing a loader for a compiler or using a syntax parser. Yet to add which method is more prone to errors.
- sdegutis 7y ago
  True but there's also things like Sweet.js, and non-s-expression languages have been able to get macros too, such as Elixir. I'm firmly convinced that s-expressions are almost pure novelty with no legitimate benefit.
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    I've been programming in Elixir for a few months now, and I like it a lot, but I found your comment amusing because a lot of Elixir's 'macro expressivity' seems to be due to Erlang using a data structure for its own parsing that can be readily manipulated as 'first class citizen' in itself. That's basically what s-expressions do. Apart from a small number of things that most people otherwise encounter in 'infix' notation, e.g. arithmetic, s-expressions seem to be a radically, and brilliantly, simple form of writing programs in a way that makes meta-programming as simple as possible. (And, of course, meta-programming is powerful, thus 'dangerous', but there's a lot of things that are only really feasible with it.)
neilv 7y ago
> Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. I used to write C and C++ code in (non-vim) vi, with only autoindent, and it was fine. I could also type the spaces, if I had to. For s-expressions, like in a Lisp, you want autoindent a bit more, and some kind of of paren-matching/highlighting is also important. Fortunately, editors have been doing autoindent and paren-matching for decades. And once your editor is formatting your code correctly, it's pretty visual, not textual. And few people write any code in something like non-vim vi or notepad.exe anymore, so I see no reason to think less of a language for wanting an editor/IDE developed in the last couple decades. There's no need for paredit, AFAIK, but paredit is another thing for which s-expressions are especially well-suited, relative to most other syntaxes. (You can also do paredit-like structural-based navigation and editing of JS, for example, but you have to have a clear model of the syntax structure, not only in the tool, but also in the programmer's head.)

nudpiedo 7y ago

The UI of an S-Expeession and a compiler transformation parse time transformation is just out of any comparison. Most of projects wouldn’t even consider writing a loader for a compiler or using a syntax parser. Yet to add which method is more prone to errors.

sdegutis 7y ago
True but there's also things like Sweet.js, and non-s-expression languages have been able to get macros too, such as Elixir. I'm firmly convinced that s-expressions are almost pure novelty with no legitimate benefit.
- aeorgnoieang 7y ago
  I've been programming in Elixir for a few months now, and I like it a lot, but I found your comment amusing because a lot of Elixir's 'macro expressivity' seems to be due to Erlang using a data structure for its own parsing that can be readily manipulated as 'first class citizen' in itself. That's basically what s-expressions do. Apart from a small number of things that most people otherwise encounter in 'infix' notation, e.g. arithmetic, s-expressions seem to be a radically, and brilliantly, simple form of writing programs in a way that makes meta-programming as simple as possible. (And, of course, meta-programming is powerful, thus 'dangerous', but there's a lot of things that are only really feasible with it.)

neilv 7y ago

> Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. I used to write C and C++ code in (non-vim) vi, with only autoindent, and it was fine. I could also type the spaces, if I had to. For s-expressions, like in a Lisp, you want autoindent a bit more, and some kind of of paren-matching/highlighting is also important. Fortunately, editors have been doing autoindent and paren-matching for decades. And once your editor is formatting your code correctly, it's pretty visual, not textual. And few people write any code in something like non-vim vi or notepad.exe anymore, so I see no reason to think less of a language for wanting an editor/IDE developed in the last couple decades. There's no need for paredit, AFAIK, but paredit is another thing for which s-expressions are especially well-suited, relative to most other syntaxes. (You can also do paredit-like structural-based navigation and editing of JS, for example, but you have to have a clear model of the syntax structure, not only in the tool, but also in the programmer's head.)