3 ms·

I tried to learn lisp, and this may sound like a trite complaint, but I honestly just could not deal with all the parenthesis. Terrible ergonomics.

by 2024throwaway 3y ago

timbit42 3y ago
Try an editor that supports Lisps.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is the kind of answer which drives people away: you just told someone doing one hard thing to do another at the same time, and that also has near certainty that they’ll hit some task which is easy in their default editor but non-trivial in whatever new one you recommended.
guenthert 3y ago
This is so often mentioned, it must be true. Or is it? To put numbers on it, I counted the occurrences of brackets, braces and parenthesis in Frank Busse's Arabesque cellular automata (just a small program for which I had the C version and a Common Lisp translation, which I happened to have looked at recently for no good reason). The C version had 86 of those characters, while the Common Lisp version 196. Yeah, more than twice as many, but can that truly be a chief reason to give up on a language?
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  It makes it very hard to, at a glance, parse what is happening.
  - guenthert 3y ago
    I do recall difficulties with this in the beginning (the first few years in my case ;-} And I still find old LISP code (the one where symbols were still capitalized) hard to parse. With modern (say, since the 90s or so), well written style where the depth of the expression is indicated by the indentation, I trust that the editor indented correctly, which allows me to forget about the parentheses. I wouldn't attempt to find a syntax error in a CL program w/o an editor supporting the language. Above might be interpreted as a case for a language with semantic whitespace and w/o excessive parentheses, e.g. like Python, but there I find it all to easy to introduce subtle bugs during refactoring.

3 ms·

I tried to learn lisp, and this may sound like a trite complaint, but I honestly just could not deal with all the parenthesis. Terrible ergonomics.

by 2024throwaway 3y ago

I tried to learn lisp, and this may sound like a trite complaint, but I honestly just could not deal with all the parenthesis. Terrible ergonomics.

timbit42 3y ago
Try an editor that supports Lisps.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is the kind of answer which drives people away: you just told someone doing one hard thing to do another at the same time, and that also has near certainty that they’ll hit some task which is easy in their default editor but non-trivial in whatever new one you recommended.
guenthert 3y ago
This is so often mentioned, it must be true. Or is it? To put numbers on it, I counted the occurrences of brackets, braces and parenthesis in Frank Busse's Arabesque cellular automata (just a small program for which I had the C version and a Common Lisp translation, which I happened to have looked at recently for no good reason). The C version had 86 of those characters, while the Common Lisp version 196. Yeah, more than twice as many, but can that truly be a chief reason to give up on a language?
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  It makes it very hard to, at a glance, parse what is happening.
  - guenthert 3y ago
    I do recall difficulties with this in the beginning (the first few years in my case ;-} And I still find old LISP code (the one where symbols were still capitalized) hard to parse. With modern (say, since the 90s or so), well written style where the depth of the expression is indicated by the indentation, I trust that the editor indented correctly, which allows me to forget about the parentheses. I wouldn't attempt to find a syntax error in a CL program w/o an editor supporting the language. Above might be interpreted as a case for a language with semantic whitespace and w/o excessive parentheses, e.g. like Python, but there I find it all to easy to introduce subtle bugs during refactoring.