[adrian_b]

While I do not like the excess of parentheses of LISP and similar languages, their syntax is very consistent and predictable. Moreover, while LISP has an excess of parentheses, it omits a greater number of commas that are required in many other programming languages.

I am much more annoyed by the random syntax inconsistencies of most popular programming languages, which are either caused by original language design mistakes, or, more frequently, by the late addition of some features that were not planned in the original language, so they had to be squeezed in with the help of various ugly workarounds.

While during the last years I have not used much LISP like languages, there have been times when I used them a lot, for several years, in scripting applications, e.g. the LISP variant of old AutoCAD, the Scheme-like scripting language of the Cadence EDA applications, or the scsh Scheme dialect that is usable for replacing UNIX shell scripts.

In all cases, these languages allowed a greater productivity associated with rarer bugs than the more popular scripting languages, like Python, Perl, TCL, bash.

While aesthetically I might prefer the look of a Python program, for solving a practical production problem I would prefer to write scripts in one of the LISP derivatives. Obviously, the productivity in various programming languages depends a lot on individual preferences and previous experiences.

It should be noted by all those who believe that the LISP-derived languages have too many parentheses, that the C programming language and all languages with syntax derived from it, like Java or Rust, have a great excess of parentheses in comparison with the older languages that had better designed syntaxes, e.g. ALGOL 68 or IBM PL/I.

For example, compare

  for (i = 1; i <= 100; i += 5) { ... }

with

  for i from 1 to 100 by 5 do ... od

or

  if ( ... ) { ... } else { ... }

with

  if ... then ... else ... fi

The first example has 12 syntactic tokens instead of the minimum required, which is 6.

The second example has 8 syntactic tokens instead of the minimum required, which is 4.

If I cannot have a decent programming language with a minimum number of parentheses, I would rather have a programming language where all the places that need parentheses are predictable, like in LISP, instead of having a language like C and its derivatives, which require parentheses in random places, for no good reason at all.

[NetMageSCW]

Now do

    for (i = 1; i <= 128; i *= 2) { … }

with by.

Now do

    if (x <= 0)
        throw ParameterException;

with fewer “syntactic tokens”.

[adrian_b]

The "for" structure introduced by the C programming language in 1974 was a very big mistake.

It has forced all programmers to write everyday a lot of superfluous boilerplate for the most frequently used kinds of loops as the price for being able to write some very rarely used kinds of loops.

A much better solution would have been to keep the kind of "for" loop used in PL/I and ALGOL 68, 2 languages from which C has taken many other features, and to add an extra kind of "for", for the rarely used loops.

An even better solution had been found quasi-simultaneously with C in the programming languages Alphard and CLU, where instead of inventing this kind of complex "for", they invented iterators, which allow the writing of "forall" loops having the same form as that for arrays or for arithmetic progressions, but for arbitrary data structures.

Iterators solve in a more ergonomic way the problem for which the C "for" was invented, i.e. to write loops that visit all the members of a linked list or similar data structures.

Your example is also solved trivially in a language with iterators, you just define a geometric progression as a generic type and then you can write a "forall" loop that iterates over all its elements.

The fact that the language C permits to omit the curly braces around a single statement helps to reduce its excessive verbosity, but not enough.

In your "if" example, you have 4 syntactic tokens: "if", "(", ")" and ";".

This is still an extra token in comparison with ALGOL 68, where your example would be written so:

  if x <= 0 then
    throw ParameterException fi

which uses only 3 syntactic tokens. The opening parenthesis that must follow C keywords like "if", "for", "while" is always a superfluous syntactic token.

For the verbosity of a programming language, only the number of syntactic tokens matters, because, depending on the preferences of the programmer, one syntactic token can be represented by either a long keyword or by an abbreviation or by a single symbol.

If minimum verbosity is desired, single symbols can be used for each syntactic token, e.g. in my own programming language the 3 syntactic tokens of ALGOL 68 would be single symbols:

  { x <= 0 ?
     throw ParameterException }