On Aug 13, 2013, at 10:02 AM, Steven Degutis wrote: > That isn't universally true. For me it was the opposite: this syntax made it > easier for my brain to process than any other language, even when I was first > learning it. Maybe my brain is diabetic and just can't handle syntactic > sugar. But I bet I'm not the only person like this.
It's not just for brains of for macros. For any system that digests and processes programs Lisp's syntactic uniformity and explicitness (parentheses everywhere) can be helpful. I'd argue that this has been important at various points in the history of AI, certainly including a field in which I now work -- genetic programming -- in which you want to support random variation and recombination of programs. OTOH that doesn't mean that Lisp's syntax is optimal for these or any other purposes. As a substrate for evolutionary computation I now favor something completely different which would be abysmal as a programming language for human programmers*. And maybe there are other syntaxes more optimal for various human brains engaged in various pursuits. But Lisp does seem to occupy an interesting sweet spot in the space of languages, supporting lots of different kinds of things (often including code that manipulates code) pretty well. -Lee * http://hampshire.edu/lspector/push.html -- -- 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.
