
(Lots of ((Irritating, Spurious) (Parentheses))) - gnosis
http://fare.livejournal.com/77842.html
======
jarin
This is a long article that can be completely summed up by the headline (it's
a rant about people who criticize Lisp's syntax).

------
sz
Why are people still talking about this?

It's like complaining that a Lamborghini sucks because the cupholders are hard
to reach. I'm sure it would bother some people, but it's not really worth
discussing, is it?

~~~
tomh-
Note that the article is from 2005. Also comparing a lamborghini cup holder
with syntax of a programming language doesn't make sense at all. The syntax of
a language is something you look at and work with for maybe 8 hours a day and
is the key part in communicating the language with the compiler and your
coworkers.

The reason I, and I guess many other people don't like the lisp syntax is pure
taste and psychological. I don't really care about a list of technical
arguments why it is good. I don't like reading or writing the syntax lisp is
written in and that will not change. That has nothing to do with being
openminded or possible technical superiority over C style syntax. Writing and
reading source code is far more enjoyable using other syntaxes solving the
exact same problems so why should I bother with lisp?

PS: Who on earth would drink coffee in his fancy lamborginhi :D

------
noamsml
I know this is probably said pretty often, but there's nothing stopping you
from creating a new syntax for Lisp so long as it can easily be translated
into the abstract form of S-Expression. That's what M-Expressions
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression>) tried to do.

~~~
Zak
Somebody tries making an alternate syntax every few years. Usually, it's an
experienced Lisper who wants to increase the popularity of Lisp. These never
catch on, and never will.

I think there are two problems. First, people who are prone to "get" Lisp are
open-minded enough not to be put off by the syntax. People who can't get past
the syntax won't grasp the other advantages.

Second, homoiconicity is Lisp's last remaining real advantage[0] over other
dynamic languages. Most Lisps are faster than Python or Ruby, but not Lua,
especially LuaJIT. An alternate syntax makes that advantage harder to access.

[0] I'm pretty sure CLOS and the condition system could be replicated in Lua,
though I'm not sure anybody has.

~~~
psykotic
> These never catch on, and never will.

Though I'm no great fan of Mr. Wolfram, I would have to say Mathematica has
caught on quite well. Mathematica isn't a Lisp (its semantics are based on
term rewriting) but it freely intermixes S-expressions and M-expressions. For
example, the M-expression a + b parses into the S-expression Plus[a, b].

~~~
Zak
Most languages parse in to a parse tree that looks something like
S-expressions, but that parse tree isn't always made of the language's own
data structures nor available to the user at runtime.

~~~
psykotic
Of course. Why is that remark relevant here? Mathematica does make its
S-expressions available to the user at runtime. They are in fact much more
available to the user at runtime than in Lisp because of Mathematica's term
rewriting semantics. Furthermore, the transformation from M-expressions into
S-expressions isn't a one-way street. By default the notebook interface will
render an S-expression as its M-expression equivalent when such exists.

------
robinduckett
var tldr = "Lots of irritating, spurious text from a Lisp advocate";

