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by rahulmutt 3453 days ago
Lisp is sexy, but parenthesis are a really hard sell for the wide crowd. It sounds silly, but that's the reality. If they had forced people to learn & use Lisp instead of C, the world might be a very different place. I personally love them even now when I look back at Clojure code.

Clojurescript is just wonderful. I'm not even sure a Haskell-like language that compiles to JavaScript (Elm, PureScript, GHCJS) with really good tooling can beat it, though I haven't tried. Would be an interesting experiment to do a comparison by writing the same app in all the languages.

1 comments

And yet, Clojure has less parens than your average JS program. Even Java has more syntactic sugar.

Just compare:

    foo.bar(baz)
to:

    (.bar foo baz)
Same number of parens...they're just in different places.

Sure CommonLisp has a ton of parens, but thats CL and it has its own set of issues.

One more example:

    Runnable foo = new Runnable() {
      Object run(Object bar)
      {
        return bar;
      }

    }
vs

    (reify Runnable
      (run [bar]
        bar))
Less parens, no brackets, no semicolons, and no ceremony. This "parens are killing Clojure" meme is just a straw-man.