In the last week, I've done this 2 or 3 times: I've opened some Clojure/CLJS file of mine in a text editor, did a search-and-replace of all open- and close-parens to a single space.
Then I ask if they've seen Python before, to which most say 'yes', and I say, 'there you go, it's Python now'. And I can immediately see the look of surprise when they see that _similarity_, because the similarity is then hard to unsee!
I recommend that trick to any others trying to open minds and challenge preconceived notions in their surroundings. :-)
Side note: I've made the point that nested SQL expressions have many nested parens, too, which we've all done. And that the sum of parens+brackets+braces is similar to other languages, just the distribution is different. Neither of those 2 arguments work as well -- I guess because it's not visual and striking?
Hmm, I feel like such a revelation would break down fairly quickly. What happens when you check equality somewhere, or add two numbers? It's not only parens everywhere (although that is quite the eyesore), other things like prefix notation also makes lispy code unpleasant to read.
This approach reminds me of when people say, hey JS has classes and constructors just like Java does! And then proceed to write Java in JS.
I think it's interesting how much people's aesthetic preferences differ on lisp syntax. Personally, I think the parentheses are visually appealing, but it's probably an acquired taste. Even more than that, I actually now find it much more difficult to parse infix notation for math, equality and so on (and not just operators in syntax-heavy languages like Haskell). Prefix notation, while requiring a different reading style, is incredibly clear and unambiguous as long as no one's gone macro-crazy on you.
Then I ask if they've seen Python before, to which most say 'yes', and I say, 'there you go, it's Python now'. And I can immediately see the look of surprise when they see that _similarity_, because the similarity is then hard to unsee!
I recommend that trick to any others trying to open minds and challenge preconceived notions in their surroundings. :-)
Side note: I've made the point that nested SQL expressions have many nested parens, too, which we've all done. And that the sum of parens+brackets+braces is similar to other languages, just the distribution is different. Neither of those 2 arguments work as well -- I guess because it's not visual and striking?