[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

You're clearly the exception though. It's almost always just ignorance in my experience. That's why I used the word probably. I assume if someone asked you what you thought about Lisp, you'd have a lot more interesting stuff to say than just "ew, parentheses", right?

That's my point, is all.

As for readability, I don't think it's trivial at all. I just don't think syntax has all that much to do with it. It plays a role, but a very minor one compared to overall code quality. In other words it's syntax that's mostly a trivial point, not readablity.

One undeniable advantage of Lisp in terms of syntactic readability though is that other languages always end up piling on more syntax over time as the language gets older. That's by far my least favourite thing about Rust for instance, even though I do love the language. There's always some new syntax, keyword, or position that an existing keyword can suddenly go in. The longer I go without actively using Rust, the more work it is to start again, because I have to go learn all this new stuff now. And syntax always takes a while to feel intuitive, at least for me. But it's still a lot easier than grokking new semantics and paradigms. I still don't have a good handle on async rust.

If someone told me to go read some ALGOL 68, I could probably do just fine because there's nothing semantically unfamiliar about it compared to something like C. But if someone gave me some Haskell written as sexps I would be utterly lost despite the syntax being perfectly comfortable to me. Because I never quite grokked typed FP.

[adastra22]

No, the horrible syntax of lisp is pretty much all I have to say on it, honestly. I don’t care for lisp for the same reason I don’t care for perl: write-only languages are a bigger hinderence to software maintenance than whatever advantage might be obtained. And the advantages of lisp have long since been obtained by other languages.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> write-only languages

Lisps are not write-only. They're easy to read precisely because there is no inscrutable syntax. Every pair of parentheses has a first element, which tells you what they're doing. The parentheses denote a scope in which to look for arguments.

Conventional style guides also make the readability practically a trivial issue because you end up indenting arguments such that the structure of the program is reflected in the indentation, because each S-expression within a parenthesized S-expression is itself an AST node. Writing readable Lisp is just a matter of reflecting the AST's structure in the indentation, which most people do in other languages anyway (to some degree).

> the advantages of lisp have long since been obtained by other languages.

Clearly not, since most other languages are still not S-expression-based. (Though, admittedly, some other advantages have been copied in other languages.)