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

submitted 4 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] barubary@infosec.exchange 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah if you just ignore all the other control characters you had to add instead then you sure saved on parens. Bravo!

Yes! Exactly! Thank you; that was my whole point.

Your whole argument is basically treating parens as something different from other syntax characters, which is a nonsensical argument. If you’re going to compare syntax then you have to compare all the syntax you have.

I'm not trying to compare syntax in general. All I'm doing is refuting the original claim, which was that Lisp doesn't use more parentheses than other ("conventional") languages. It does.

All that stuff about syntactic noise, granted. I mean, I don't agree personally, but it's irrelevant to my point.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

Again, it's very weird to single out one type of control character. You have to compare syntax trade offs holistically. However, even when you straight up compare parens, there isn't a significant difference. Pretty much every language, except those using whitespace, will have two parens for arguments and curlies for the function body, or a statement. This is roughly the same number of parens you end up with in Clojure, minus all the other characters. The difference is just not that dramatic in practice.