4 ms·

why do people want to do this?

• overshard 15y ago
  Same reason people use different programming languages in general, they just prefer/like/forced/are used to it. If you like clojure and must program in python, have an idea of how to implement something in clojure but not in python then just use clojure now.
• zaphar 15y ago
  It's a way to share data with a clojure application. And s-expressions are a pretty good format for data transfer so it's not a terrible idea to provide ways for people to use it as such.
  • dustingetz 15y ago
    XML and Json are much more mature ideas for data sharing. edit: google results for: "python xml" : 359,000 "python json" : 48,600 "python s-expression" : 5,440
    • acuozzo 15y ago
      > XML and Json are much more mature ideas for data sharing. How're they more mature than s-expressions? I don't think everything needs citations, but I'd like to see some supporting evidence for this particular claim.
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      • andrewflnr 15y ago
        You probably don't need a citation to know that s-expressions have been around much longer than XML or JSON, for what that's worth.
    • awj 15y ago
      Why are "google results for python %s" a useful maturity metric here? A better argument would have been showing that both xml and json can be parsed/generated through standard Python libraries. S-expressions don't support this behavior.
    • zaphar 15y ago
      I didn't say mature I said they were a good format for it. And by what metric are you measuring maturity? * Age? s-expressions predate python by a fair amount. * Parsers? just about every language I know has a lisp interpreter embedded in it. s-expressions therefore have parsers in pretty much all languages. * Market Share? well xml and json may win there but I'm not sure that's a valid reason to discount s-expressions