

What the non-Lisper sees - nickb
http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/1397/lispnd7.png

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brlewis
Oh, I think I just understood this phenomenon. In C/Java/etc. if you see more
than two levels of nested parens you know at a glance that it's code that's
hard to follow. No wonder people's alarm bells go off when they see Lisp. If
they could just relax and learn it, they would find it isn't so hard.

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mark_h
There's an interesting observation in "On Lisp" regarding the shape of
programs written in different styles, along those lines. Imperative programs
tend to have a fairly straight and vertical left margin, programs in a
functional style usually slope in (for lack of a better description; that's
not the actual quote which from memory says "blocky" and "fluid" instead).

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acgourley
I'm tempted to make a similar graphic with some junit/jmock code in java.

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migpwr
this is accurate! coming from a non-lisper...

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ivankirigin
I 100% agree. If there is any way to get rid of the parens, Arc should do it.
My guess is that smart people have thought of this a lot, and they can't be
removed, even with whitespace restrictions like python.

