[spdegabrielle]

Rhombus is designed to be

* approachable and easy to use for everyday purposes, with a readable indentation syntax; and

* uniquely customisable with an _open-compiler API_ that is accessible to a wide audience.

[cptmurphy]

Racket is already approachable and easy to use for everyday purposes

[bjoli]

A lot of people hate sexprs. Even seemingly reasonable folks.

I imagined they have met students that really struggle with the syntax, while grokking the concepts easily.

I myself have heard "the parentheses are hard to balance" and "after a while you dont even see the parentheses" enough times that I think maybe both can be correct.

[iLemming]

> A lot of people hate sexprs

In all my time I have never come across a single Lisper, neither in person nor online, and I know far more than a few dozens, who once grokked the REPL-driven workflow and the structural editing idioms only to later, for whatever reason, suddenly start disliking or even hating s-expressions.

All that so-called "hatred" stems from unfamiliarity. People fuss about Lisps lacking static types, without a single clue about how a "true" REPL trades them off for something different. They compare it to a Python or C# REPL and think "it ain't a big deal". Well, the Lisp REPL is quite different, and yes, a major deal - every single part of the Read-Eval-Print-Loop differs. They complain about "hard to deal with parentheses" and "I can't refactor without types" while having no clue how amazingly nice structural editing is in practice, that you never even think about parens - you only see structure, order and reason.

[jitl]

well, i guess i know what the grandparent was talking about when they said 'I myself have heard [...] "after a while you dont even see the parentheses" enough times [...]'. Thanks for the example.

[drob518]

My editor balances my parentheses (Emacs Paredit). I rarely think about them. I just think structurally and the editor manages the details.

[psychoslave]

It really feels like, "when I move through the wasteland, I only focus on the path and GPS is guiding me well".

For some reasons, people tend to prefer having a walk in a forest rather than in z wasteland.

[jitl]

For you, perhaps. I've never been able to get into lisp style sexpr syntax languages :'(

[ashton314]

)

There matched your paren for you.

[ginko]

Adding significant whitespace to a new language feels like a bad choice. It's not terrible but I do think it was a bad call for Python in hindsight.

[cmoski]

Massive fail. I dread having to move code around my F# codebase.

[pasquinelli]

why do you think it was a bad choice?

[ginko]

It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside. Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.

[miffi]

Shrubbery, Rhombus's first-pass indentation-sensitive syntax, has a syntax form to facilitate copy-paste.

With guillemets, « and », you can make a section of Shrubbery code indentation-insensitive. The idea for copy-paste it to "armor" the section you want to copy with guillemets in the right places, and unarmoring it after posting.

This needs editor support to do fluidly, but imo it's much better than trying to copy-paste the indentation-sensitive syntax.

The Guillemets syntax is described here: <https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/group-and-block.html#...>

I can't tell from my 5 minutes of poking DrRacket whether it supports this "armoring", I've been writing Shrubbery in nvim, which, unsurprisingly, does not support it.