4 ms·
> Everything written in Lisp or Scheme just seems to be an obfusc and contrarian way of writing something that would be much simpler in almost any other languag
by embedding-shape 6mo ago
> Everything written in Lisp or Scheme just seems to be an obfusc and contrarian way of writing something that would be much simpler in almost any other language.
Probably just a "familiar with you know" thing, since me and others have the straight up opposite experience, anything not s-expressions seems needlessly obfuscated with lots of special characters and syntax all over the place, instead of just one syntax for everything, making programs so much simpler.
But you're hardly alone with that sentiment, just like I'm also not alone, so either just "brain wired that way" or something similar. The discussion is as old as the internet, highly subjective and impossible to measure, so around we go.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoSo what kind of things do you use s-expressions for? Is there something they're really good at that I don't know about yet?
- embedding-shape 6mo agoEverything? The full projects are in lisp syntax (s-expressions), not Algol-like syntax (C-like syntax) that most people are familiar with. Personally I mostly use Clojure, but lots of lisp-like languages offer the same (simpler) experience of programming.
- mbac32768 6mo agoprobably the best use of s-expressions is as an alternative to json which you can implement in 50 lines of code e.g. pretty good for config files or basic serialization
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> pretty good for config files Case in point which suits well for config files; EDN - https://github.com/edn-format/edn https://github.com/edn-format/edn