Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eadmund 2688 days ago
> As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.

That's probably true, but I think it's useful to fight the good fight regardless. Even if Lisp & s-expressions don't, in fact, take over the world (and I think they will), arguing in their favour might help increase the chance that whatever inferior technology does end up getting adopted is better than it could have been.

> Or you could go the other way and say that JSON is s-exps with curly brackets so it should be made executable as such, and build that language.

The problem is that without symbols, that ends up being hideously ugly. This:

    ["if",
     ["<", 1, 2],
     "less than",
     "greater than or equal to"
    ]
is appreciably worse than:

    (if (< 1 2)
        "less than"
        "greater than or equal too")
And alternatives like:

    {"if": [[1, "<", 2], "less than", "greater than or equal to"]}
are so much worse that I don't think anyone could seriously expect to use them.