the rizzler

the article talks a lot about the parentheses but honestly i have to think that’s the wrong way to go about it. when i write lisp in stock vim i type a lot of i()ESChi. then i don’t even have to think about the parentheses. it’s a pain in the ass to do it that way obviously which is why most lisp developers use plugins. but with the right formatting you read it just like python. control flow is a problem for me in some lisps though. for what it’s worth, i thought the error the article had with the missed parenthesis was pretty noticeable.

also maybe more importantly, i kinda don’t think the proximity argument holds water. plenty of languages use all sorts of spacing to delimit arguments and none of them are harder to read than c. smalltalk comes to mind, which the stackoverflow annual survey once had as its most beloved language of the year. objective-c had similar syntax but with square brackets. i don’t think either one was particularly hard to read, just unfamiliar to c-only programmers. obviously that was a problem for a “language” that just bolted a new thing onto c, but i don’t think it’s a problem in general.

hard disagree. i’ve been a huge RPN calculator fan since middle school. not only does it eliminate a whole class of errors i know everyone makes, but it frees up the corresponding mindshare. i know back when i had math classes i was much faster than everyone else with the calculator. maybe the mandatory parentheses make it less of an issue but i still hate infix notation with a passion. and a lot of languages don’t even use the standard order of operations, nor do they use the same order of operations as each other. so either way i’m making code that looks like lisp because i can’t be fucked to learn a different order of operations for every language i use.