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You never spent much time with it and the parens are a major impediment? If you cannot overcome the "parens" (non) issue, I suppose the language is not for you.
by tpfour 7y ago
You never spent much time with it and the parens are a major impediment? If you cannot overcome the "parens" (non) issue, I suppose the language is not for you. It really is not an issue, _at all_.
I don't say this to be demeaning! I would say there are far more chances you really enjoy the language than not. Give it a try and stop worrying about the parenthesis and start thinking in terms of an AST.
(let ((x 0)) (+ x 1))
If you want Python that's fine but there is definitely no problem with parens in Lisp/Scheme :)
- lukifer 7y agoHa, just thinking aloud! More of my own psychological barrier than a knock on Lisp. I do like it quite a lot, it's just completely alien compared to a life of experience with C-like languages.
- filoeleven 7y agoI found its alien nature to be kind of helpful in learning Clojure, actually. The paren position change really does melt away quickly, and in the meantime it was a good reminder that I was “not allowed” to do procedural code or mutate variables; I had to use a different mindset. Most people who check out Clojure have been coding for 10+ years, so you’re in good company as far as ingrained habits go. As others have said, the best way to check it out is to get a REPL running in a decent IDE and play with the language. There’s something quite intuitive in its workflow: knowing that you want to do something, though you’re not quite sure what it is yet, and typing a single ( gives you all the power and space you need to figure it out no matter how deep inside a code block you are.