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by brlewis 854 days ago
The same reason as why Esperanto is not the most popular spoken language. It's historical reasons and network effects.
1 comments

No, it's difficult to read and understand. It's a parenthesis circus. For example -

https://github.com/dimitri/pgloader/blob/master/src/pgsql/pg...

I clicked thinking I was going to see some gnarly Lisp code. It's out there!

This, on the other hand, is perfectly legible if you know the language. I'd say it's even perfectly legible if you don't, but how would I know?

There are a couple good examples in there of what I said in another comment, about how, quite aside from getting the hang of reading and writing sexprs, one also has to learn a rather more foreign discipline of building up linked lists in the idiomatic way. Which is a greater barrier than learning to read `(and foo bar)` as `foo && bar`. That part really doesn't take long.

Esperanto is difficult to read and understand. It's an accent circus.

I'm having fun with Typescript these days, but parentheses are what I miss most from my Scheme days. They're objectively better.

“Read” the indentation - ignore most of the parentheses.