Having written Python code professionally for about 7 years and taken to Clojure as a serious hobby for a year and a half, I have thought a lot about the differences between the two languages.
While parens provide simple and powerful homoiconicity (and they have a somewhat pleasing aesthetic -- let's face it, if you feel strongly otherwise you'll just steer clear of any Lisp), they do introduce some visual noise while reading code. Readability matters to me quite a bit (but not as much as simplicity), and Python still seems more readable to me. I have seen others express this opinion on this list. A simple workaround I've considered, but haven't gotten around to doing anything about in e.g. Emacs, is to simply tone down the parens visually in the editor. Hierarchy of color, size, contrast, etc. matters a lot in perception, and by making the parens slightly less obvious visually one's eye would be drawn to the actual functions more, "parsing" the parentheses only when several symbols exist on the same line. Similar to what colorizing parentheses does - the color tells you more, if you pay attention to it. Despite a passion for Clojure I do keep an eye on other languages and I am curious about e.g. template Haskell and Julia, both of which do the homoiconicity thing without all the parens. When I program in Python I sure do miss other features of Clojure - speed, immutable data structures, and especially macros. -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
