[tosh]

I can't recommend highly enough to implement a simple lisp (or a forth).

Illuminating experience and it will also help you see (among many other things) the parentheses in a different light.

[stdatomic]

First day of paradigms course in the 2000s and prof says "if your opinion of Scheme is too many parentheses, then you're an idiot."

Needless to say that was my opinion and every day I think, more and more, how right he was.

(later I did make some gui apps that included scripting and chose s-expr syntax because of how simple it is to implement it)

[bananaflag]

There are two problems with Lisp parentheses in my opinion:

1) Humans are not that equipped to handle that level of nesting without some other aid, this is why Lisp code is usually indented.

2) Parentheses aren't just about grouping, and this is unintuitive. For example, x is not the same as (x). This is a bit like in set theory where x is not the same as {x}, but parentheses do not look like the kind of sign that would work like that.

[wmedrano]

I thought parentheses were fairly intuitive. They are not for grouping, more like representing an AST.

For other languages, similarly, x is not the same as x()

[NooneAtAll3]

main problem isn't brackets themselves - it's that they're too on the right

had brackets been displayed as curly braces in C - everything would look much more manageable

[eska]

I changed my opinion about parens when I stopped formatting like C, and used indent rather than parens to denote blocks. That is, a large amount of them at the end is totally fine.

[phpnode]

so, instead of

    (foo (bar (1 2 3))

you'd prefer

    {
      foo {
        bar {
          1
          2
          3
        }
      }
    }

is that right?

[NooneAtAll3]

    ( aar
      (bar1 1 2 3)
      (bar2 1 2 3)
      (bar3 
         (car1 2 3)
         (car2)
         (car3)
      )
    )

vs

(aar (bar1 1 2 3) (bar2 1 2 3) (bar3 (car1 2 3)(car2)(car3)))

[irishcoffee]

Emacs vs vim, go!

[shakna]

I actually find wisp [0] harder to read/write than just plain Scheme.

But there's quite a few little reader projects that swap out the first layer of syntax for another. Lisp isn't entirely tied to one representation.

[0] https://www.draketo.de/software/wisp