4 ms·

agreed, and well said in broadstrokes, imo, Lisp's endless plasticity of infinitely nested parentheses is both its greatest strength and... its greatest weakne

agreed, and well said in broadstrokes, imo, Lisp's endless plasticity of infinitely nested parentheses is both its greatest strength and... its greatest weakness I love it at Write time. hate it at Read/Maintain time. why I've avoided it for serious work. Python, Java, Go Rust etc are all easier for my brain & eyes to quickly parse on the screen which is unfortunate. because I still drool at Lisp's linguistic power

reikonomusha 5y ago
Lisp at "read/maintain" time in a good environment is probably the most enjoyable time for me working with Lisp, assuming it's on a code base that followed some sort of coding standards. Introspection, debugging, and navigation in a Lisp environment are incredible.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Still the average function written by a smart lisp programmer is going to make me sigh, take three deep breathes, and set aside some time to focus, while the average function by a smart Go programmer, I can just read. This readability loss does counteract the ability to reload forms into a running core. Especially now when i am trying so hard to make everything running be immutable and derived from various git repos.
  - throw10920 5y ago
    I don't think this is a Lisp thing, though - you get this same problem with Haskell and C++ and Perl as well, because the cultures of all of those languages normalize and encourage writing clever, difficult-to-read code. Similarly, if you're working by yourself, or in a team with shared norms, you care far less about average function written by a random smart Lisp/Haskell/C++/Perl programmer, and more about what (a) you/your team writes and (b) the ergonomics of the language itself. In fact, I argue that Lisp is slightly better than the above languages because much of its fanciness comes from macros, which you can trivially expand inline to simplify the code - which you can't do with fancy category theory constructs in Haskell, and is only barely possible with boost:: templates in C++, for instance. (that isn't to say that I disagree with your point "the average function written by a smart lisp programmer..." - I completely agree with your assessment, I just don't think it's either as big of a problem as it could be, nor is it unique to Lisps)

reikonomusha 5y ago

Lisp at "read/maintain" time in a good environment is probably the most enjoyable time for me working with Lisp, assuming it's on a code base that followed some sort of coding standards. Introspection, debugging, and navigation in a Lisp environment are incredible.

lanstin 5y ago
Still the average function written by a smart lisp programmer is going to make me sigh, take three deep breathes, and set aside some time to focus, while the average function by a smart Go programmer, I can just read. This readability loss does counteract the ability to reload forms into a running core. Especially now when i am trying so hard to make everything running be immutable and derived from various git repos.
- throw10920 5y ago
  I don't think this is a Lisp thing, though - you get this same problem with Haskell and C++ and Perl as well, because the cultures of all of those languages normalize and encourage writing clever, difficult-to-read code. Similarly, if you're working by yourself, or in a team with shared norms, you care far less about average function written by a random smart Lisp/Haskell/C++/Perl programmer, and more about what (a) you/your team writes and (b) the ergonomics of the language itself. In fact, I argue that Lisp is slightly better than the above languages because much of its fanciness comes from macros, which you can trivially expand inline to simplify the code - which you can't do with fancy category theory constructs in Haskell, and is only barely possible with boost:: templates in C++, for instance. (that isn't to say that I disagree with your point "the average function written by a smart lisp programmer..." - I completely agree with your assessment, I just don't think it's either as big of a problem as it could be, nor is it unique to Lisps)