Many/most of the best programmers I know have allergic reactions to
parens. I think this is a normal reaction based on the amount of
successful time they have spent with ; terminated languages. FWIW, I
certainly flinch when I see Objective-C code with [ ] in strange
places, although these other programmers do not.
I'd like to think that forgetting about operator precedence and
enabling things like (< 1 2 3 4) are the first step to appreciating
list oriented mental parsing.
I don't hope Clojure ever becomes a lowest common denominator
language. There will always be a stream of competitors for that title,
like VB and Java. But I do hope that Clojure becomes widely known
enough to build a reputation for terse, fast, concurrency-friendly
code with a fair amount of punctuation. Remember, the punctuation
threshold for "hello, world" in Java is {([]){();}}
On Dec 18, 7:59 pm, Martin Coxall <pseudo.m...@me.com> wrote:
> On 19 Dec 2009, at 00:53, Sean Devlin wrote:
>
> > What you're looking for is called "Python".
>
> > The parens are your friend. Learn to love them. They are there to
> > remind you that you're building a data structure, not just writing
> > code.
>
> > Sean
>
> As it happens, I agree with you: I learned to stop noticing the parens a long
> time ago, and think that Clojure's rather pragmatic approach to
> parens-reduction (lambda/vector literals) and other syntactic conveniences
> (object invocation syntax, comma whitespace) strikes a good balance.
>
> But I'm trying to think of it from the point of view of Joe Q. Coder, who
> will take one look at our beloved elegant, expressive Clojure, see all the
> parens and run screaming.
>
> Many people find would Clojure's comparative lack of syntax very
> human-hostile. Who is the intended audience of Clojure? Is it other Lispers?
> Or other Java programmers?
>
> Martin
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