Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thisiszilff 2794 days ago
The biggest benefit is that you can keep a very clear model of everything that's going on in the language (well, most things), from parsing to evaluation to application. The parenthesize represent very important things about how the language works and the regularity of the language emphasizes that it's a few basic principles replicated again and again. Also, the "beautiful" lisp variants tend to be in the scheme family. Common lisp is wart and pragmatic by comparison.
1 comments

There is no difference between Scheme and Common Lisp when it comes to parentheses and beauty. Everything you mention (simplicity, regularity, few basic principles) apply just the same to Common Lisp. The differences between the two are mostly standard library related (irrelevant to matters of beauty) and lisp-1 vs lisp-2 (no clear winner in terms of beauty I would say).