On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 11:06 PM Davide BERTOLOTTO < davide.bertolo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After all these years I am still wondering how people like complicated > sintaxes full of special forms more than the simplicity of lisp. After all, > the parentheses and the prefix notation do not look so terrible to me, > especially considering that you gain a lot in clarity and simplicity of the > language. Probably is the same reason that pushes people to create yet > another programming language every now and then xD. > I wonder the same. My conclusion is this is due to two main related reasons: 1 people doesn't know about more simpler, nicer and powerful syntax and don't want to know because feel comfortable in the point it is 2 people is trained in only a way (that's is a relevant bias) In most universities and programming lessons the adopted point of view is a turing machine one specially about programming and even taking lessons about other programming paradigms (for sure lambda calculus and functional programming is teached) the exercises, training and 'work-oriented' practices are always inserted into the turing machine object oriented style, usually java. The result is people is used to infix notation, math-like syntax and even point-access syntax which are commonly used by TMOO languages to the point most functional ones adopt the same syntax, thus is always more natural for programmers to follow the path from C or java to haskell or python rather than smalltalk, lisp, factor, etc The thing is so biased that most alternative languages provide syntactic sugar to present own syntax as c-like syntax and even abandon own syntax in favour of c-like one. IMHO is very strange since prefix notation is simpler, easier to read and most powerful, and more similar to math notation (skipping operators) than infix notation. Adaptation is very easy too so my conclusion is it all about comfort and extension. A clearly example is all that complaints about parens hell in lisp but very few about curly brackets hell (for stating just one evident thing) regards
