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by spacemanaki 4838 days ago
It's been proposed a few times, and some people have gone pretty far with it, http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html

It's never really caught on though, I would guess due to inertia. Most Lisp programmers just get used the parens, and maybe those that can't end up not using Lisp.

2 comments

As a non-lisper reading over some of those examples I definitely prefer his "Sweet-expression". Seems much more approachable.

Once I make a serious foray into Lispland maybe that'll change...

Change your IDE's color scheme so that parens are rendered in a low-contrast font color. The parens will be less-obvious.

Emacs' automatic indentation to The Proper Place is tremendously useful. I find Lisp's indentation to be just as easy as Python's, for example -- likely as I have used a Lisp for six years before coming to Python.

Once you've used it for a while, you don't think of it as much different from using {} for control blocks, () for method calls, and [] for array indexing in other languages. For me, the parens "go away", in that I follow the program control flow more by indentation than by counting parens.

That's unfortunate, I think.

It would really open up the list world, especially to those of us comfortable with python.

It seems like such an obvious upgrade to me, since:

A: In no case will it break code that works now. B: It would always be possible to translate to and from it unambiguously, so if a team wanted to keep all of their code one way or the other, each individual developer could still see things with their own preference - imagine a tool like `gofmt`.