7 ms·

Is it an innate property of humans that the curly-brace style is more natural? I wonder if in an alternate universe where Lisp took off as the browser language

by sakras 2y ago

Is it an innate property of humans that the curly-brace style is more natural? I wonder if in an alternate universe where Lisp took off as the browser language people would find it more natural instead. It seems like somewhat of a chicken-egg problem.

lmm 2y ago
I think it's innate that having differentiated syntax for different types of grouping is natural. Look at mathematical papers where people will introduce new brackets with new meanings. (Indeed look at the entirety of QM for a clear, simple case)
- nequo 2y ago
  Some Scheme and Lisp dialects have that. For example, Racket often uses square brackets instead of parentheses for things like clauses of a cond expression, and Clojure uses square brackets for vector literals and curlies for hash map literals.
- lispm 2y ago
  > "Look at mathematical papers where people will introduce new brackets with new meanings" Common Lisp has left brackets like {} and [] to the user (aka developer). It supports "reader macros", where the user can extend/supersede the syntax of s-expressions. So, specialized tools/libraries/applications can introduce these brackets for their own use. Examples are embedded SQL expressions, notations for Frames (special objects, in kind of a mix of OOP and Logics), grammar terms, etc. Thus it explicitly supports the idea of "people will introduce new brackets with new meanings".
lopatin 2y ago
Does decades of empirical evidence not prove that people are more comfortable with imperative, curly brace programming over s-expressions? It's not a chicken and egg problem. The egg has hatched and nested parentheses lost.
- shakow 2y ago
  Decades of empirical evidence prove that people are more comfortable with functional, reactive, beging/end delimited programming, i.e. Excel.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    millenia of empirical evidence and through to today, shows that most people are more comfortable not coding at all.
    - gumby 2y ago
      True, the majority of humans never even saw a computer.
- Ologn 2y ago
  Does over a century of empirical evidence not prove that people are more comfortable with keyboards whose top row is laid out "QWERTYUIOP"?
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Has there ever been research on this? Perhaps this situation has come about because the schools people must go to to get the programming jobs only teach the Javascript way? It seems circular logic to say that the current paradigm must be superior for the fact that it is the current paradigm. Is it possible that there are other reasons it reached that status?
  - pas 2y ago
    does n=1 count? :) some time ago I tried Racket, and just no. recently I tried Scala ZIO HTTP, and yes. Maybe it's the types? Maybe it's the parens. But probably both. I cannot really recall my experience, just that manipulating code was ridiculously clunky. My assumption was that the IDE will manage the parens for me and when I'm moving something somewhere it'll figure out if I messed up the parens.. and ... no, nothing. I had to balance them with hand.
ralphc 2y ago
I don't know if it's innate but it's what we have. Lisp has been around about as long as programming, it's had plenty of time to catch on, it hasn't. Maybe innate, maybe it's an offshoot of teaching math in an infix style, 1 + 2 vs. + 1 2.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  I don't think it's been tested at all. for people who took and finished a course in Lisp as their first programming language, how many "hate parens"? I have no trouble with lisp's parens, i like them. What I never liked though, is that the first item in the list was an operator, a verb lets say, and the rest were the nouns; whereas, you could also have nested lists say of numbers where there were no operators. Never felt right (not that I can think of a better way, not worth adding more parens)
- gsbcbdjfncnjd 2y ago
  But good college math departments teach reverse Polish notation; i.e., Hewlett-Packard over Texas Instruments. It’s demonstrably more advanced / efficient.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  Lisp became very popular, then died off rapidly due to association with the AI Winter.
troad 2y ago
I would argue that imperative programming is most natural - it's what everyone gravitates to in the beginning. Then, at a sufficient level of complexity, a programmer gravitates to solutions like OOP or FP, but there's an obvious trade off in readability there. 99 Bottles of Beer implemented with a loop is intrinsically going to be easier to read than an implementation with tail recursion, even though the latter is generally better. Lisp's inside-out parentheses style adds yet more cognitive load on top of that. Many things are socially constructed, but not everything.
- trealira 2y ago
  Imperative programming is probably the most intuitive, but I'm doubtful curly braces and C-like syntax are anything more than coincidence. The first programming language was Fortran, and it didn't look anything like C. This is a really old Fortran program copied from a book: WRITE(6,28) READ(5,31) LIMIT ALIM = LIMIT 5 SUM=0.0 DO 35 ICNT=1,LIMIT READ(5,32) X 35 SUM = SUM + X AMEAN = SUM/ALIM WRITE(6,33) AMEAN GO TO 5 28 FORMAT(1H1) 31 FORMAT(I3) 32 FORMAT(F5.2) 33 FORMAT(8H MEAN = .F8.2) END Most modern programming languages seem to take inspiration from C, which took inspiration from BCPL, and that from Algol. Others took inspiration from Algol directly, like Ada, or Lua. And Python has indentation-based block structure, rather than having blocks of statements delimited by braces or or an "end" keyword.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    I always liked Pascal's BEGIN and END statements instead of curly braces. There is also Basic where the blocks built into control flow statements, like FOR I=1 TO 5 [code here] NEXT I I'd argue a lot of programming language evolution is influenced by the capabilities of our IDEs. When you code in a text editor, the terse syntax of C is great and brings advantages over the verbosity of Pascal, Basic or god forbid Cobol. Once your editor does auto-indentation the braces seem redundant and you get Python. Smart completions from IntelliSense are essential to efficiently writing C#, and now that LSP has brought that to every IDE or smart text editor we have the explosion of popularity of more explicit and more powerful type systems (Typescript, typed Python, Rust). Programming languages are shaped by their environment, but the successful ones far outlive the environment that shaped them.
samatman 2y ago
The curly braces themselves are 100% irrelevant, as evidenced by the many, many successful and well-liked languages which don't use them, including Python, which is in the running for the most-used language these days. They're an implementation detail. What's closer to innate is the Algorithmic Language, Algol for short, the common ancestor of the vast majority of languages in common use (but not, notably, Lisps). Algol was designed based on observational data of how programmers, who had to somehow turn their ideas into the assembler to run on machines, would write out those ideas. Before it was code, it was pseudocode, and the origins predate electronic computers: pseudocode was used to express algorithms to computers, when that was a profession rather than an object. That pseudocode could have been anything, because it was just a way of working out what you then had to persuade the machine to do. But it gravitated toward a common vocabulary of control structures, assignment expressions, arithmetic as expressed in PEBCAK style, subroutine calls written like functions, indexing with squared brackets on both sides of an assignment, and so on. I revert to pseudocode frequently when I'm stuck on something, and get a lot of benefit from the practice. So I do think that what's common in imperative languages captures something which is somewhat innate to the way programmers think about programs. Lisp was also a notation! And it fits the way some people think very well. But not the majority. I have some thoughts about why, which you can deduce an accurate sketch of from what I chose to highlight in the previous paragraph.
- trealira 2y ago
  > Algol was designed based on observational data of how programmers, who had to somehow turn their ideas into the assembler to run on machines, would write out those ideas. Before it was code, it was pseudocode, and the origins predate electronic computers: pseudocode was used to express algorithms to computers, when that was a profession rather than an object. I believe you, but do you have a source for this? I can't find papers on how they chose to develop the syntax of Algol in the beginning.
mcswell 2y ago
Then why does this web page use indentation to clarify who's replying to whom, instead of {}s?
kazinator 2y ago
C-like syntax is brutally hostile to programming beginners. There is not a shred of anything natural about it.
- skydhash 2y ago
  There's nothing natural about programming, because no ones like to be that formalized in their thinking process, especially with things that should be common sense (although ambiguity is still an issue). It's the recursive definition that get people. Especially when pointing that the things that the computer can do form a very small set. It's just that they can do it very fast. You can see that when observing novices programming (without stack overflow or similar help). They often assumes that it will get done (magically) as soon as they call that function. And their code organization reflects the ad hoc thinking instead of a planned endeavor.
  - wwweston 2y ago
    The formality of programming is unnatural to many (though the impulse to formality and robustness as displayed in logic & math clearly is millenia old, however niche), but a fair bit of it is as natural as language itself, or magic.
jimbokun 2y ago
That alternative universe was the early 1980s where Lisp was very popular to learn due to bring consider the best language for AI.
anonzzzies 2y ago
Because lisp is trivial to parse, it’s easy to make an extension for vs code that shows / edits Common Lisp / scheme looking completely different; you can make it unrecognisable. If the () are the only thing bothering people, then this is very simple to resolve. Can hardly be the only thing though. It’s also easy to build operators similar to the ones you have in Python etc like filter, map etc so you don’t have to apply recursion. These are there already but you can build them yourself in a few hours. So it’s probably just what people learn first + lack of ‘marketing’ or negative PR (there are no libraries or ecosystem! The thing that least bothered me about CL but people with npm leftpad experience seem bothered by it). It’s interesting as I worked I almost everything in production; c/c++ (including the MS 90s flavour), Delphi, VB, Perl, PHP, Java, C#, Haskell, F#, Common Lisp, Erlang, TS/JS, Python, Ruby, asm (z80, arm, x86) and I simply have not had a better overal experience than CL. The others are better at some things but a an overal experience, CL just is a pleasure.

by sakras 2y ago

lmm 2y ago

I think it's innate that having differentiated syntax for different types of grouping is natural. Look at mathematical papers where people will introduce new brackets with new meanings. (Indeed look at the entirety of QM for a clear, simple case)

nequo 2y ago
Some Scheme and Lisp dialects have that. For example, Racket often uses square brackets instead of parentheses for things like clauses of a cond expression, and Clojure uses square brackets for vector literals and curlies for hash map literals.
lispm 2y ago
> "Look at mathematical papers where people will introduce new brackets with new meanings" Common Lisp has left brackets like {} and [] to the user (aka developer). It supports "reader macros", where the user can extend/supersede the syntax of s-expressions. So, specialized tools/libraries/applications can introduce these brackets for their own use. Examples are embedded SQL expressions, notations for Frames (special objects, in kind of a mix of OOP and Logics), grammar terms, etc. Thus it explicitly supports the idea of "people will introduce new brackets with new meanings".

lopatin 2y ago

Does decades of empirical evidence not prove that people are more comfortable with imperative, curly brace programming over s-expressions? It's not a chicken and egg problem. The egg has hatched and nested parentheses lost.

shakow 2y ago
Decades of empirical evidence prove that people are more comfortable with functional, reactive, beging/end delimited programming, i.e. Excel.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  millenia of empirical evidence and through to today, shows that most people are more comfortable not coding at all.
  - gumby 2y ago
    True, the majority of humans never even saw a computer.
Ologn 2y ago
Does over a century of empirical evidence not prove that people are more comfortable with keyboards whose top row is laid out "QWERTYUIOP"?
wholinator2 2y ago
Has there ever been research on this? Perhaps this situation has come about because the schools people must go to to get the programming jobs only teach the Javascript way? It seems circular logic to say that the current paradigm must be superior for the fact that it is the current paradigm. Is it possible that there are other reasons it reached that status?
- pas 2y ago
  does n=1 count? :) some time ago I tried Racket, and just no. recently I tried Scala ZIO HTTP, and yes. Maybe it's the types? Maybe it's the parens. But probably both. I cannot really recall my experience, just that manipulating code was ridiculously clunky. My assumption was that the IDE will manage the parens for me and when I'm moving something somewhere it'll figure out if I messed up the parens.. and ... no, nothing. I had to balance them with hand.

ralphc 2y ago

I don't know if it's innate but it's what we have. Lisp has been around about as long as programming, it's had plenty of time to catch on, it hasn't. Maybe innate, maybe it's an offshoot of teaching math in an infix style, 1 + 2 vs. + 1 2.

fsckboy 2y ago
I don't think it's been tested at all. for people who took and finished a course in Lisp as their first programming language, how many "hate parens"? I have no trouble with lisp's parens, i like them. What I never liked though, is that the first item in the list was an operator, a verb lets say, and the rest were the nouns; whereas, you could also have nested lists say of numbers where there were no operators. Never felt right (not that I can think of a better way, not worth adding more parens)
gsbcbdjfncnjd 2y ago
But good college math departments teach reverse Polish notation; i.e., Hewlett-Packard over Texas Instruments. It’s demonstrably more advanced / efficient.
jimbokun 2y ago
Lisp became very popular, then died off rapidly due to association with the AI Winter.

troad 2y ago

I would argue that imperative programming is most natural - it's what everyone gravitates to in the beginning. Then, at a sufficient level of complexity, a programmer gravitates to solutions like OOP or FP, but there's an obvious trade off in readability there. 99 Bottles of Beer implemented with a loop is intrinsically going to be easier to read than an implementation with tail recursion, even though the latter is generally better. Lisp's inside-out parentheses style adds yet more cognitive load on top of that. Many things are socially constructed, but not everything.

trealira 2y ago
Imperative programming is probably the most intuitive, but I'm doubtful curly braces and C-like syntax are anything more than coincidence. The first programming language was Fortran, and it didn't look anything like C. This is a really old Fortran program copied from a book: WRITE(6,28) READ(5,31) LIMIT ALIM = LIMIT 5 SUM=0.0 DO 35 ICNT=1,LIMIT READ(5,32) X 35 SUM = SUM + X AMEAN = SUM/ALIM WRITE(6,33) AMEAN GO TO 5 28 FORMAT(1H1) 31 FORMAT(I3) 32 FORMAT(F5.2) 33 FORMAT(8H MEAN = .F8.2) END Most modern programming languages seem to take inspiration from C, which took inspiration from BCPL, and that from Algol. Others took inspiration from Algol directly, like Ada, or Lua. And Python has indentation-based block structure, rather than having blocks of statements delimited by braces or or an "end" keyword.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  I always liked Pascal's BEGIN and END statements instead of curly braces. There is also Basic where the blocks built into control flow statements, like FOR I=1 TO 5 [code here] NEXT I I'd argue a lot of programming language evolution is influenced by the capabilities of our IDEs. When you code in a text editor, the terse syntax of C is great and brings advantages over the verbosity of Pascal, Basic or god forbid Cobol. Once your editor does auto-indentation the braces seem redundant and you get Python. Smart completions from IntelliSense are essential to efficiently writing C#, and now that LSP has brought that to every IDE or smart text editor we have the explosion of popularity of more explicit and more powerful type systems (Typescript, typed Python, Rust). Programming languages are shaped by their environment, but the successful ones far outlive the environment that shaped them.

samatman 2y ago

The curly braces themselves are 100% irrelevant, as evidenced by the many, many successful and well-liked languages which don't use them, including Python, which is in the running for the most-used language these days. They're an implementation detail. What's closer to innate is the Algorithmic Language, Algol for short, the common ancestor of the vast majority of languages in common use (but not, notably, Lisps). Algol was designed based on observational data of how programmers, who had to somehow turn their ideas into the assembler to run on machines, would write out those ideas. Before it was code, it was pseudocode, and the origins predate electronic computers: pseudocode was used to express algorithms to computers, when that was a profession rather than an object. That pseudocode could have been anything, because it was just a way of working out what you then had to persuade the machine to do. But it gravitated toward a common vocabulary of control structures, assignment expressions, arithmetic as expressed in PEBCAK style, subroutine calls written like functions, indexing with squared brackets on both sides of an assignment, and so on. I revert to pseudocode frequently when I'm stuck on something, and get a lot of benefit from the practice. So I do think that what's common in imperative languages captures something which is somewhat innate to the way programmers think about programs. Lisp was also a notation! And it fits the way some people think very well. But not the majority. I have some thoughts about why, which you can deduce an accurate sketch of from what I chose to highlight in the previous paragraph.

trealira 2y ago
> Algol was designed based on observational data of how programmers, who had to somehow turn their ideas into the assembler to run on machines, would write out those ideas. Before it was code, it was pseudocode, and the origins predate electronic computers: pseudocode was used to express algorithms to computers, when that was a profession rather than an object. I believe you, but do you have a source for this? I can't find papers on how they chose to develop the syntax of Algol in the beginning.

mcswell 2y ago

Then why does this web page use indentation to clarify who's replying to whom, instead of {}s?

kazinator 2y ago

C-like syntax is brutally hostile to programming beginners. There is not a shred of anything natural about it.

skydhash 2y ago
There's nothing natural about programming, because no ones like to be that formalized in their thinking process, especially with things that should be common sense (although ambiguity is still an issue). It's the recursive definition that get people. Especially when pointing that the things that the computer can do form a very small set. It's just that they can do it very fast. You can see that when observing novices programming (without stack overflow or similar help). They often assumes that it will get done (magically) as soon as they call that function. And their code organization reflects the ad hoc thinking instead of a planned endeavor.
- wwweston 2y ago
  The formality of programming is unnatural to many (though the impulse to formality and robustness as displayed in logic & math clearly is millenia old, however niche), but a fair bit of it is as natural as language itself, or magic.

jimbokun 2y ago

That alternative universe was the early 1980s where Lisp was very popular to learn due to bring consider the best language for AI.

anonzzzies 2y ago

Because lisp is trivial to parse, it’s easy to make an extension for vs code that shows / edits Common Lisp / scheme looking completely different; you can make it unrecognisable. If the () are the only thing bothering people, then this is very simple to resolve. Can hardly be the only thing though. It’s also easy to build operators similar to the ones you have in Python etc like filter, map etc so you don’t have to apply recursion. These are there already but you can build them yourself in a few hours. So it’s probably just what people learn first + lack of ‘marketing’ or negative PR (there are no libraries or ecosystem! The thing that least bothered me about CL but people with npm leftpad experience seem bothered by it). It’s interesting as I worked I almost everything in production; c/c++ (including the MS 90s flavour), Delphi, VB, Perl, PHP, Java, C#, Haskell, F#, Common Lisp, Erlang, TS/JS, Python, Ruby, asm (z80, arm, x86) and I simply have not had a better overal experience than CL. The others are better at some things but a an overal experience, CL just is a pleasure.