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You know your brain adapts so you can read something easier/faster the more you are exposed to it. For me, Lisp code couldn't be easier/faster to read and compr
by armitron 7y ago
You know your brain adapts so you can read something easier/faster the more you are exposed to it. For me, Lisp code couldn't be easier/faster to read and comprehend.
I'm convinced most of the people making jokes about parentheses or Lisp code being hard to read are superficially dismissing it without putting in even a minimal effort of working with it.
Things that don't immediately click are discarded. Individual curiosity ("Really smart people say great things about this, I wonder why that is..") leading to individual effort leading to deep understanding is not the prevailing attitude.
Sad state of affairs.
- lispm 7y agoI think that the syntax has some hurdles, but it's not the parentheses: It's to mentally understand when lists and symbols are data and when they are code. That's a problem not found in other programming languages and at the same time it is an interesting feature. Lisp is not alone to have such hurdles - another example would be Haskell which is also more difficult to learn than the average programming language (lazy evaluation, type system, monads, ...). Often Lisp had been used as a teaching language for computer science concepts (recursion, evaluation models, algorithms, etc.) and thus it was associated by students with novel concepts they struggle with and not with solving practical problems. A typical example is the SICP book. It's great, but mostly CS and mathematics oriented -> the result is that the feedback is mixed.