[capableweb]

Both of you miss the most obvious difference between Clojure and all mainstream languages: it's a lisp.

I've had so many programmers look at code I write and proclaim: "wow that looks impossible because of the parenthesis" and that would never touch anything like it because it seems so different.

Some people do take the time to learn how it works, but many just have a knee-jerk reaction to it and then forget about the language itself.

[Kototama]

I have a theory: it's because Blurp progammers learn to equate parentheses with complex (mathematical) expressions. The view of many parentheses at once must trigger an acceleration of their heart pulse.

[jeofken]

It’s just like C or JS but the first paren goes to the left of the function name.

[Blikkentrekker]

With function calls, yes.

What makes it different is that syntactic constructs are also expressed with the same syntax and there is no special syntax, so control flow constructs use a syntax similar to function calls.

This is particularly exuberant in Arc where what in many languages would be:

    if        (<cond1>) {
      <then expr1>
    } else if (<cond2>) {
      <then expr2>
    } else if (<cond3>) {
      <then expr3>
    } else {
      <else expr>
    }

Would instead be:

    (if
      <cond1> <then expr1>
      <cond2> <then expr2>
      <cond3> <then expr3>
      <else expr>)

Note the complete lack of syntax beyond a keyword having 7 arguments in order, which many find nonconsecutive to reading, and also error prone as accidentally making a typo can completely change the meaning of the program.

It is thus that most Lisps have somewhat more redundant syntax:

    (cond
      [<cond1> <then expr1>]
      [<cond2> <then expr2>]
      [<cond3> <then expr3>]
      (else    <else expr>))

Personally, I wouldn't mind that a mandatory `->` be required in between the conditions and the expression to further guard against accidental typos. I find that redundancy in syntax guards against accidental mistakes, though I have nothing against the parentheses and in fact favor them.

[bionhoward]

Pattern matching in rust:

  match x {
      <cond1> => <expr1>,
      <cond2> => <expr2>,
      <cond3> => <expr3>,
      _ => <expr>,
  } 

  let message = match maybe_digit {
      Some(x) if x < 10 => process_digit(x),
      Some(x) => process_other(x),
      None => panic!(),
  };

Seems useful. Python's getting match soon too!

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/expressions/match-expr.h...

[kaliszad]

Clojure specifically doesn't have the bracket wrapper around condition-expression pairs but syntax highlighting/ formatting considers it and aligns stuff nicely. I don't think, it is a problem that it basically is a list or function call with arguments. I do think, adding `->` just like that would be a problem because it would be very inconsistent with the syntax of Clojure.

[kaliszad]

Well yes. Clojure in general tends to have less special syntax and in general is designed very consistently. What I find very useful is the threading macro ->> and -> which basically is a pipeline:

(-> something (manipulation-of-something) (nextmanipulation) (anothermanipulation))

instead of:

(anothermanipulation (nextmanipulation (manipulation-of-something something)))

Often, you can remove some parenthesis in the first case as well.

I really love this. It is also very easy to just wrap it in a let or a function. This alone should open the eyes of anybody, who has written at least some Shell script somewhere or does some data analysis. If it doesn't, maybe the person isn't actually that great of a thinker or a practitioner and you would be better off around other people professionally. Frankly, who are the people, who cannot grok moving the opening parenthesis before the method/ function? I don't think I have ever met anybody like that - I only read/ hear about such people in comments or at conferences and I haven't heard a name yet.

[snotrockets]

I don’t think it’s the parents, but the s-expression themselves.

LISPs forces you to maintain the stack for the parse tree in your head, something humans aren’t that great at — s-expressions are the programming language equivalent of center embedding, which is quite alien for human languages (the depth is three at most: compare that to your favorite lisp program)

[regularfry]

If you've seen 300+ line react components marching off the right of the screen, you'll know that maintaining the parse tree in your head isn't a barrier to popularity.

[grncdr]

While this made me laugh a bit, I think there's a meaningful difference between using "tree-like" syntax for all your code (lisp & S-expressions) vs declarative UI descriptions (JSX).

A deeply nested syntax is beneficial for UI work because you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered. S-expressions for HTML/UI in the form of Hiccup-style templates are equally good (if not better) for the same reason.

In JSX however, there is a clear syntactic distinction between behaviour (C-like JavaScript syntax) and interface descriptions (HTML-like element constructors). In Lisps, the uniformity makes it harder to quickly distinguish "behaviour" from "data", which is kind of the point, but comes with a trade-off in readability.

[capableweb]

> In Lisps, the uniformity makes it harder to quickly distinguish "behaviour" from "data", which is kind of the point, but comes with a trade-off in readability.

Maybe in theory, but in practice it's easy to tell because in the case of hiccup, the data is data (as vectors) and behavior is behavior (as function calls), those have different syntax in Clojure.

Lisps are excellent at manipulating trees, which is exactly what HTML and the DOM is.

[kazinator]

> you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered

Note that you're taking for granted that the document must necessarily be a nested tree structure, which then behooves us to follow in the code.

Which may be right and good (and in any case is foisted on us); but the assumption bears spelling out.

[W4ldi]

300+ line components are not popular

[regularfry]

Not with me they're not, no.

[capableweb]

You might be right in the first part, and the "fear" of s-expressions are only expressed as a fear of parenthesis.

But on the second part I think that's the same as for most languages. You end up with nested scopes at the same degree as any c-like language really. But most lisp programmers tend to break out into new functions a bit earlier than let's say JS programmers. I'd argue that normally you'd have to keep track of less depth in a normal Clojure program than you would in a JS program, simply because of how a programmer usually works in those languages.

[kazinator]

That's true if you write everything on one line. But how could you fail to notice that most Lisp code is written on multiple lines and indented? The structure is visually laid out, so as not to be maintained in anyone's head.

[snotrockets]

Line breaks only shorten lines, they do not change the reading direction. Yes, you can start at the bottom and read upwards, but that's unnatural for most.

Compare:

  something.first().second().third()

With:

  (third
    (second
      (first
         (something))))

The end from read must you to understand, and it gets more complicated as your code does. No wonder Clojure's threading macro is so popular, as it would allow you to write it as:

  (-> something first second third)

Fun fact: Lisp was never supposed to be written with S-expressions. They were intermediate representation, for bootstrapping. McCarthy designed M-expression, with function notation, inflix, and sugar'd cond and list; but all that was omitted due to lack of time, and we were left with S-exps.

[lispm]

> Lisp was never supposed to be written with S-expressions. They were intermediate representation, for bootstrapping.

That's not the complete picture.

The early Lisp manual had a definition for Lisp syntax. The Lisp syntax was based on M-expressions for code and S-expressions for data.

Basically what now is

    (append (quote (1 2 3))
            (quote (a b c)))

was

    append[(1,2,3);(A,B,C)]

where the function call uses M-Expression syntax and the data were S-expressions.

Then we have so-called S-Functions, which work with S-expressions. append is such an s-function.

McCarthy then defined a mapping from M-Expressions to S-Expressions, thus that M-Expressions could be represented (not just written, but also in memory) as S-expressions.

In the next step he defined new S-functions called apply and eval, which took M-Expressions as S-Expression data and computed the results of apply or eval operations.

Example use of apply:

   apply[(LAMBDA,(X,Y),(CONS,X,Y));((A,B),(B,C))]

Thus these s-functions could compute with code which was represented at runtime by s-expression data.

Thus such a program would use both code in M-Expression format and compute with code in S-Expression format.

Since these S-functions apply and eval could be themselves translated to s-expressions and get executed, the specific S-functions apply and eval could get executed by a s-expression evaluator.

The code above would then be written:

    (APPLY,(LAMBDA,(X,Y),(CONS,X,Y)),(QUOTE,((A,B),(B,C))))

which in modern way would be written as

    (apply (lambda (x y)
             (cons x y))
           (quote ((a b) (b c))))

Since programs thus were executed / computed as s-expressions, they were input, computed and printed as s-expressions.

Thus the idea of a simple s-expression meta-programming system made the idea of an additional step of m-expression syntax reading/printing less attractive.

[kazinator]

You have a strawman example of piping via .member() because those () sometimes have arguments; that's what they are there for. Function application has not gone away; it's just combined with obj.member access. It can easily become an unreadable mess that will need some way of splitting across lines and indenting:

  something.first(other.foo(bar.f(x, y)).memb, z).second(x.y()).third(a, b, c)

This:

  (third
    (second
      (first
         (something))))

is just function notation with the location of the opening parenthesis having been re-examined, and commas removed. Function application notation is found in a myriad languages: sin(cos(pow(x, 2))).

With the above indentation, it's very readable to me; it's very clear that calculation starts with (something) and moves in an outward direction.

  (-> something first second third)

Right, yes, so we have threading macros, and people use them. That's not all that goes left to right. Lisp's ancient progn (including implicit progn) goes left to right, as do the arguments of functions and most macros:

  (defun app ()
    (init)
    (event-loop)
    (cleanup)
    (exit 0))

Sequential binding can break up a nested "point-free" expression, as an alternative to threading:

  (let* ((a (first (something)))
         (b (second fi))
         (c (third se))
     ...)

[snotrockets]

Of course you could work around s-expressions (and make your ALGOL-formatted language looks like Lisp, a common complaint against my own code by my coworkers), that wasn't my argument.

Most aren't fond of Lisp syntax, regardless of how you dress it up, and thus writing in Lisps doom you to have fewer people to hand over your code to, and I don't think that scarcity is useful. I suspect the reason most don't like s-expression is that it forces the human reader to maintain a "mental stack", an exercise humans are not too good at, as demonstrated by human languages aversion of center embeddings.

[kazinator]

You seem to be stuck on this idea of deep function call nesting being an impediment, which is solved by foo.bar().baz() chained syntax using object dot notation.

But most mainstream languages have chained function call notation as a feature.

Furthermore, foo.bar().baz()... chaining is a fairly recently emerging idiom. It has been possible in a number of languages for decades already, but somehow didn't take off. You would hardly see chains of foo.bar().baz().xyzzy() in 1990 vintage C++ code bases, even though 1985 vintage C++ would easily support it.

Anyway, there is a dialect of Lisp which has integrated the dot syntactic sugar into S-expressions, according to this basic idea:

  This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 257.
  Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on an empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet.
  Poke a few holes in TXR with a fork before heating in the microwave.
  1> '(quote x) ;; i.e. just like we have a 'x -> (quote x) sugar ...
  'x
  2> '(qref x)
  (qref x)
  3> '(qref x y) ;; we can have a x.y -> (qref x y) sugar
  x.y
  4> '(qref x y z)
  x.y.z
  5> '(qref x y z w)
  x.y.z.w
  6> '(qref x y 3 w) ;; (let's not when it's ambiguous with floating-point)
  (qref x y 3 w)
  7> '(uref x)  ;; ... and a .x.y (uref x y) sugar
  .x
  8> '(uref x y)
  .x.y
  9> '(uref x y z)
  .x.y.z
  10> '(uref x y 3 w)
  (uref x y 3 w)

Embedded compounds are possible, of course:

  11> '(qref (a) (b) c (d) e f (g))
  (a).(b).c.(d).e.f.(g)

I never intended this to be used for chaining! In fact, only in a fairly recent update to the list-builder object, did I fix it so it can do this:

  12> (new list-builder).(add 3).(add 4).(pend '(5 6 7)).(pend 8).(get)
  (3 4 5 6 7 . 8)

Needless to say, the methods have to return the object in order to make this possible. Before the update, the methods didn't have a specified return value.

In the first place, list-builder is an implementation mechanism under the build macro, which expresses it like this:

  13> (build (add 3) (add 4) (pend '(4 5 7)) (pend 8))
  (3 4 5 6 7 . 8)

so there is no reason to use list-builder directly in most code.

This chaining business is a minor benefit (if at all) of the dot notation. The main motivation is to make programming with structures and OOP more ergonomic. It has a big impact for programs that use data structures, because the use of data structures and OOP can pervade the entire program, and is a driver behinds its structure.

Anyway, anyone discussing S-expressions under the assumption that they do not have a dot notation that can be used for function chaining is simply unaware of the research having been done in this area in the TXR Lisp project.

[jfoutz]

I love that you use 4 indirections before getting to you main, parenthetical, point.

[joelbluminator]

Can you blame them though? Look at Python/Ruby where even non developers can sometimes understand the code and then look at some crazy Haskell/Lisp expression.

[capableweb]

Yes, I do blame them for this because if you spend 10 minutes, any programmer can learn "some crazy lisp expressions" because they are not that crazy.

This knee-jerk reaction you're having is exactly the ones I'm talking about :)

[joelbluminator]

So you're saying there's absolutely no loss of readability in something like Lisp opposed to Python?

[monsieurbanana]

Is there? I'm not convinced.

I think a lot of the readability issues come from lisp syntax being unfamiliar, not from some intrinsic impenetrability.

And then even more from being associated with functional programming, also unfamiliar to a lot of people.

Look at common lisp nested for loop[0]. Are they really that hard to read?

And then there's the minimalism of lisp syntax. Once you know how to call a function and the few data literals (list, vectors, set, ...), you know 90+% of the syntax.

Compare with python, where you also need to learn class syntax, annotation syntax, for loops, if, while, comprehensions, etc.

And the list keeps growing, there's new features being added continuously. In lisp, if the language introduces a new construct, it's still going to be just symbols in between two parenthesis.

[0] https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/iteration.html#lo...

[capableweb]

I'd argue that because of the lightweightness of Lisp syntax compared to C-like languages, Lisp languages are easier to read. But then I'm a professional Clojure developer who used to do Golang, JavaScript and some other languages, but since couple of years ago only do Clojure and ClojureScript development, so I'm obviously biased.

But then Python is probably the worst example to compare Lisps to, as Python sees whitespace as a significant character that can affect if the program can run or not.

[blandflakes]

I'm sympathetic to the parents that it's not as bad as people say, but I'd definitely agree with you that syntax at least to me provides a lot of value. Of course, too much syntax is a problem in the other direction.