[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.

[lmm]

> 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.

And we've never seen bullet holes in these parts of the plane, so there's no point putting armour there.

[adastra22]

This is survivorship bias. People who don't like s-expr aren't lispers.

I've used Lisp before. I can read s-expr code. Unfamiliarity is not the issue. I just don't like them. I don't like Haskell/ML either, and I've written large projects in both, so it's not a Lisp-specific thing.

[bjoli]

As I said, i think they have been teaching long enough to have a pretty good basis for the claim that racket's syntax can be a problem.

I am firmly in the "after a while you don't see the parentheses" camp, but I have a friend who I respect a lot who works in clojure (with Emacs/cider/paredit) that just doesn't like it.

I mean, I prefer sexprs above all other syntaxes, and I have had people tell me I just need to get used to indentation syntax or whatever they fancy.

[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.

[drob518]

Look, if you’re committed to Blub, don’t let me talk you out of it.