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Honest question, why aren't s-expressions in their purest form more prevalent? This seems to happen constantly on HN: Post: "Behold, a data format!" C

Honest question, why aren't s-expressions in their purest form more prevalent? This seems to happen constantly on HN: Post: "Behold, a data format!" Commenter: "This is just poorly implemented s-expressions!" I know some heavily idolized LISP person out there made the over-quoted statement that all languages end up implementing s-expressions badly. I did LISP in college. I had my moment of transcendence with it. So I get the fandom for it. But I don't get why people keep paraphrasing this one sentence over and over, yet absolutely no one uses s-expressions outside of LISP. The one person I know who uses LISP in the private sector (via Clojure which many people refuse to recognize as a LISP for some reason?) is being hired to do very academia type research and publish white papers about it. The rest of LISP users are quirky members of academia who complain endlessly about Python's prevalence. It just kinda seems like if LISP or s-expressions were truly that great, there would be more convergence around it for expressing data structures.

patrickthebold 4y ago
This isn't an answer to your question, but I really like this (somewhat old) clojurescript react wrapper: https://github.com/levand/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/architecture-examples/quiescent/src/todomvc_quiescent/render.cljs#L12-L25 https://github.com/levand/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/architecture... Notice there is no JSX to define react components, just s-expressions. (yes I know you can use React without JSX, but I think it's interesting that in a lisp there's not really much need to introduce something like JSX). Anyway I think it's a neat example on how applicable s-expression are.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"I know some heavily idolized LISP person out there made the over-quoted statement that all languages end up implementing s-expressions badly." Not being at all versed in the LISP world myself might you or someone else share where the original quote came from?

patrickthebold 4y ago

This isn't an answer to your question, but I really like this (somewhat old) clojurescript react wrapper: https://github.com/levand/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/architecture-examples/quiescent/src/todomvc_quiescent/render.cljs#L12-L25 https://github.com/levand/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/architecture... Notice there is no JSX to define react components, just s-expressions. (yes I know you can use React without JSX, but I think it's interesting that in a lisp there's not really much need to introduce something like JSX). Anyway I think it's a neat example on how applicable s-expression are.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"I know some heavily idolized LISP person out there made the over-quoted statement that all languages end up implementing s-expressions badly." Not being at all versed in the LISP world myself might you or someone else share where the original quote came from?