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by qsort 1384 days ago
Larry Wall's remark was less about prefix notation and more about how there's very little visual difference. I don't necessarily agree with the criticism because that's the price you pay for homoiconicity, and it's a price well worth paying; but it was a more serious complaint than "lmao parentheses".

See e.g. Clojure, that introduced #{} for sets, [] for vectors etc.
2 comments
agumonkey 1384 days ago
It's funny cause to me visual differences in syntax are just useless information overload. And another dimension of constraints to deal with. That's why I clinged to low syntax languages.. you write in semantics almost. The rest is problem solving (or even extending metadomain with macros or else to help yourself)
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Banana699 1384 days ago
>that's the price you pay for homoiconicity

Well no but actually no. Mathematica is homoiconic, and it has tons of special syntax and sugar that all boils down to lists when you quote. Elixir also does this with a ruby-like syntax on top. Those are just the 2 I know of. Making the compiler available through a programmer-accessible API from within the program itself is the big idea, it has nothing to do with what the text grammar happens to be.

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