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by midnight_eclair 70 days ago
i can link you similarly undecipherable walls of text in rust and zig and c

but i bet if you sat down a junior developer not yet entrenched in any style yet, they'd be able to grok lisp code MUCH faster than the intricacies of syntax of the other alternatives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2 comments

To me, it's the uniformity and limited rules that make lispy languages attractive.

Javascript's destructuring syntax can look almost indecipherable, and it is mostly because the language syntax is not uniform in its meaning.

  const f = ({a: {b: [x, , z] = [], c: {d: w} = {}} = {}, e: [, y] = []} = {}) => ({x, y, z, w});
This is a function written in one of the most popularly used programming languages in the world.
My opinion about this, is that it appears to depend on how a particular person's brain is wired, as to which language(s) they will understand faster and like. There can be a "winner" in terms of which language more people gravitate towards, but then that is very relative to many factors, including corporate influence.

People also put themselves into bubbles. Once in, they can filter out other languages (with all kinds of excuses), and be overly focused on certain families or only specific languages.