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Parinfer was instrumental to me learning Clojure. Paredit felt like operating an airplane cockpit, and Parinfer took that experience and made it much closer to
by fnordsensei 2y ago
Parinfer was instrumental to me learning Clojure. Paredit felt like operating an airplane cockpit, and Parinfer took that experience and made it much closer to just writing prose, for which I am forever grateful.
I remember people, including Rich Hickey, scoffing at it when it came out, which seemed like kind of a snobbish reaction to something that lowers the barriers of entry.
- bowsamic 2y agoRich Hickey was referring to editors that hide parentheses entirely, not paredit nor parinfer. This was explicitly cleared up after the talk
- kazinator 2y agoI can't see Hickey not liking parinfer; of course he had to mean something else.
- fnordsensei 2y agoI'm pretty sure he doesn't use it though. Have you seen the formatting of the Clojure source code? It's eclectic.
- fnordsensei 2y agoAha, really? What editors do that?
- bitwize 2y agoParedit was written primarily for the use of its author, Taylor R. Campbell. If you ever met Taylor R. Campbell, you would understand why it feels like an airplane cockpit. (Think: John Carmack writing something for John Carmack's use, and it turns out you need to be as smart as John Carmack to figure it out.) I tried Paredit out in the early days; it was heavily inspired by SEdit, the structured editor that came with Xerox's Interlisp-based Lisp machines (an open source version of whose OS is available here: https://interlisp.org https://interlisp.org). I really liked it, but with time I found it was just another "targeting computer" I had to switch off in order to keep focus on my code, so I ended up not using it for most of my Lisp work.