Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.
The claim that somehow this retains all qualities of Lisp is absolutely ridiculous. The single most important property of Lisp is that programs are lists, i.e., code==data. "Indented" lisp breaks this.
I'm not intending to troll when I say that people who don't like the parens just don't "get it."
Not necessary that "indented" lisp breaks code==data property. Just like YAML can represent an arbitrary tree structure, indented syntax can be mapped to S-expr and vice versa.
I suspect the reason that alternative syntax for Lisp doesn't fly is that, once you use Lisp enough, you start feeling too comfortable with S-expr and the editor's support on it to switch to alternative syntax. It only appeals to those who are new to the language. And the downside is that the editor support can't be as good as S-expr (I suppose; is python-mode capable of various C-M-something tricks?).
I do. When I think of algorithms I vaguely imagine DAG, which maps nicely to S-expr (the junction point maps to a tail function call).
In languages with syntax, I have to add syntactic fluff to satisfy the compiler, which is mostly an extra annoyance.
I don't say my way of thinking is the correct one. Some great programmers I respect have said they don't think in DAG (and naturally they choose languages other than Lisp as a primary tool).
By automating the process of converting between 'indented' lisp and 'regular' lisp those that want it can have it and those that do not can simply ignore it.
True, having a round trip to Lisp's standardized format might make this usable. I have to wonder how much of Ruby's success is owed to being unable to trivially share Python code with strangers without most of our tools shredding the whitespace.
That's one of my pet peeves with python. Even sites like the django documentation suffer from this, cut&paste simply does not work in the python world and it is much poorer because of that.
It also can make debugging such a problem hell because you have to completely grok the code in order to spot the fact that the last line of a code block has somehow mysteriously jumped left 4 spaces.
Cut and paste is a good way to get the definitions from the tutorial into the interpreter without reading them.
Personally, I've only ever had a problem copy-pasting from the web. Even then, it is rare; a mild occasional annoyance well worth the price of the clutter free syntax.
There are other uses for cut/paste besides CutAndPasteProgramming; for example, one may want to post a snippet to a comment box that doesn't offer a preview function.
def foo():
if something:
do_something_else
print "bar"
I've done this with Ruby and set the color to light gray. My co-workers wanted to have C/Java-style parens around damn near everything (except when they didn't; the reasoning to omit them was something along the lines of, "But, see, here it's a DSL." )
They strike me as line noise and make it harder to read many things, so I lightened up the color in my vim syntax files to give the appearance of more white space.
I had mixed results. Yes, it was far more readable to me, but there were times when a paren was missing or mistakenly added, or the spacing was off (another coding standard violation), and so on.
Now that I code on my own, the new coding standards say no parens unless required by the language. I also changed my syntax coloring back to more clearly show parens.
Heated debates amongst programmers (coworkers) about marginally important questions such as indenting styles, parenthesis usage, naming conventions, source code directory structure, etc. are always very amusing to observe. I usually sit back and just watch the show.
Srsly, looking past the brackets is the least problem in reading lisp. The harder part is dealing with the lack of syntax, so you have to remember place structures instead of picking up hints from the punctuation. And in that regard, Pythonic indenting makes it harder.
Nearly every Lisp development environment does that. SLIME, the poster child of excess does this as well. I don't think I matched parenthesis, indented or looked up a documentation since 2005.
Either have parentheses and format by hand or use parentheses and have the editor format the text. Personally, I like the latter best. Easier to change stuff.
