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by c3534l 1388 days ago
And yet its still filled with unncessary parentheses like an involuntary tic.
2 comments

Lisp code tends to have fewer delimiting punctuation characters than most algol style current languages. I think people tend to dislike languages that have only the minimum necessary, because it's easy to misread code then and redundancy helps compilers catch mistakes as inconsistent syntax.

But there's always Forth for the the lighter taste in delimiters: https://github.com/TexTerry/forth-examples/blob/master/pasca...

I never understand these complaints about parenthesis, my editor takes care of them. Interestingly people never complain about the inconsequences in mathematical notation, i.e. infix operators like plus or minus (e.g. 3+5), postfix operators like faculty (i.e. 9!) and last but not least prefixed user defined funtions like f(x).

But as Lisp was my first real language, I might be a bit biased. And besides Lisp I like languages like Forth or Postscript, and even Perl ;-)

What editor takes care of your parentheses? I haven't found anything quite painless enough for me to want to dive into all that punctuation. Are you talking about paredit? Parinfer? Something else?
It’s not about writing but about readability. Clojure is easier to read than Scheme because it uses more punctuation (brackets and braces instead of only parens.

There’s a point in using different signs that mean different things.

That's great, but they specifically sold it as not having Lisp-like syntax. And yet its incredibly Lisp-like.
At a glance it appears to have less punctuation than Python. Slightly more than YAML. Do you want ambiguity? This is how you get ambiguity.