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> I don't see why I should have to do the tedious work of figuring out all the parentheses manually. I think most people who write a lot of Lisp don't do that.

by Zak 3y ago

> I don't see why I should have to do the tedious work of figuring out all the parentheses manually. I think most people who write a lot of Lisp don't do that. I use Paredit mode in Emacs, which doesn't allow the parens to become mismatched and has operations like "move the last token out of this expression" and "jump to the next expression" so it actually feels like you're editing a tree rather than a chunk of text. A quick search says there's an equivalent for VSCode, and I'm sure other editors have options as well. I've seen some amount of structural editing for languages that don't use s-expressions, but it's always pretty limited. If you've written Lisp with a good structural editor and still don't like editing a program as a tree, then we think about code very differently.

HexDecOctBin 3y ago
> operations like "move the last token out of this expression" and "jump to the next expression" And that is the problem. When I am writing code, last thing I want to do is to think about tree manipulation and the numerous commands to do similar-but-not-the-same operations. This is the same reason I don't like Vim, it's hard enough to keep the problem domain in mind, there's no mental space to also remember the ed-style editing commands.
- packetlost 3y ago
  After the learning period it becomes muscle memory and you don't have to think about it. If you're not willing to put in even the small amount of effort to build up new muscle memory, I don't know what to say other than don't be so defeatist.
- Zak 3y ago
  This must be where we think about code very differently. Most code has a tree structure, though many put the root token outside the brackets that mark it. Languages like C, Java and Rust use brackets to express their tree structure much like Lisp does, though they use more flavors of bracket than Common Lisp. Python uses indentation, but it's still expressing a tree. Ruby, Lua, BASIC, and others add keywords, but the stuff inside `do ... end` is still a branch of a tree. Without a structural editor, I'm still building a tree, but I have to keep more of it in my head.

by Zak 3y ago

HexDecOctBin 3y ago

> operations like "move the last token out of this expression" and "jump to the next expression" And that is the problem. When I am writing code, last thing I want to do is to think about tree manipulation and the numerous commands to do similar-but-not-the-same operations. This is the same reason I don't like Vim, it's hard enough to keep the problem domain in mind, there's no mental space to also remember the ed-style editing commands.

packetlost 3y ago
After the learning period it becomes muscle memory and you don't have to think about it. If you're not willing to put in even the small amount of effort to build up new muscle memory, I don't know what to say other than don't be so defeatist.
Zak 3y ago
This must be where we think about code very differently. Most code has a tree structure, though many put the root token outside the brackets that mark it. Languages like C, Java and Rust use brackets to express their tree structure much like Lisp does, though they use more flavors of bracket than Common Lisp. Python uses indentation, but it's still expressing a tree. Ruby, Lua, BASIC, and others add keywords, but the stuff inside `do ... end` is still a branch of a tree. Without a structural editor, I'm still building a tree, but I have to keep more of it in my head.