On: New Languages Considered Harmful: "Learning new languages is a waste of time."

[Zak]

Note that I said the syntax is small for all of (list of languages) and most of those have a small standard library. CL has a simple syntax and a large standard library. By extension, so does Qi.

[ced → Zak]

There's more to the syntax than just the parenthesis. That you write

   (let ((x 4)) (print x))

instead of

   (let x 4 (print x))

is part of it. So is the order of arguments.

[Zak → ced]

Sure, those are all parts of the syntax of a language, but I still maintain that CL's syntax is simpler and more regular than that of Ruby and vastly simpler than that of Java.

As an aside, the first form of the example you gave is what most Lisps use. CL, Scheme, Emacs and Goo all use this. The second, as far as I know is only used by Arc, which has a more complicated syntax than most Lisps.