Programmer Humor

38240 readers

33 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

cat_programmer@lemmy.ml

AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml

When people encounter Lisp syntax for the first time (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] barubary@infosec.exchange 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I disagree with pretty much everything you write here, but especially this:

First of all, you have exact same amount of parens as you would in a mainstream language like Java, C, or Js.

My Perl example uses "mainstream language" syntax. Apparently that doesn't count because it's Perl (scary! mental overhead! write only!), so here's exactly the same thing in JavaScript:

function hypot(x, y) {    return Math.sqrt(x ** 2 + y ** 2);}

... or

const hypot = function (x, y) {    return Math.sqrt(x ** 2 + y ** 2);};

... or

const hypot = (x, y) => Math.sqrt(x ** 2 + y ** 2);

Note how none of these involve four layers of nested parentheses.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The total number of parens in your examples is about the same, except you also have a bunch of noise like random semicolons sprinkled in. Meanwhile, nesting is a feature, not a bug because it provides you with additional visual information about relationships in code. The only people who incessantly bray about nested parens are the ones who've never actually worked with Lisp for any period of time. If this was a genuine problem with the syntax then stuff like sweet expressions would've taken off. The reality is, as I already explained and you've ignored, is that the editor manages the parens for you. When you work with Lisp, typing opening paren is equivalent to having a command sequence to say I'm starting a new expression.