[caltelt]

I think that might be the first time I've ever seen "Clojure" and "lack of parenthesis" in the same sentence. Presumably you meant C-style parens. :D

I agree though. Honestly, getting worked up over such fluff as where parens go, which whitespace to use, what line curly braces go on is a minor annoyance of mine. The human brain is capable of parsing some pretty obscure stuff (see: human language) just fine.

[dualogy]

Just gets so visually noisy when reading code though. Maybe depends subjectively on how a given individual tries to re-conceptualize high-level ideas from low-level instructions. I actually have my Sublime/VScode color schemes set up so that all "punctuation" is as grey / half-invisible as the comments and indent-guide --- really helps me scan curly code-bases whether Go, JS or all the others =)

[dmitriid]

It's funny to see people talking about how noisy parentheses/braces are when a regular ReasonML program before adopting a more Javascript-y syntax looked like a combination of random punctuation.

Same goes for a lot of Haskell code.

[dualogy]

> looked like a combination of random punctuation. Same goes for a lot of Haskell code

"A lot", not "all": yeah indeed at least you can tweak the punctuation towards more ergonomic (aka more productive) aesthetics. What you describe is just the unfortunate result of many-perhaps-most (early) Haskellers / the std-lib authors being married to established-but-ugly academic operator symbols instead of boldly redesigning them for green-field programmers of this (then, newly from-scratch) programming language.

Once swapping out the built-in `.` for <. and `>>>` for .> and $ for <| and & for |> it all comes a breeze to read (I mean, in comparison), about on par with Elm/F#. Now I've never heard anyone complain that Elm code is unreadable, it's a good example for other MLs to follow.

The rest of what you describe is just due to these hackers being heavily into their own combinator libraries, truly if you code all day, just as there shouldn't be a need to elaborately spell out "function" and "return" and so forth all the time in imperative, they feel less need to spell out all the map/filter/reduce English words all the time. At some point, all the names describe "symbolic relations of sorts" and I wouldn't fault anyone for philosophizing: "that which is specific to my program should be named as words, but that which is 'primitive' / generalized / commonly used among all sorts of programs could just as well be just symbols" ;)

I mean I hack in Go all days right now and it's fun --- lots of parens & braces don't exactly kill me. Here, tweaking one's colour scheme easily solves this in one fell swoop and takes just under a minute tops. No need to go "ML-ish FP" just for the lack of curlies. =)

[dmitriid]

It's basically a struggle between "too much syntax" and "not enough syntax" :)