I fully agree with you Konrad. If Clojure eases up code reading for non-Lispers while not changing the principles behind then what's the problem ? As far as breaking the s-expr esthetics... bof, I could not care less. Easier here means easier to understand for non-Lispers. They are the ones we need to convince to embrace Clojure. Before commonly used applications starts to generate code as part of their design will not be the norm before a decade at least. Then we can start to worry about s-expr lack of uniformity if really this is still an issue.
Clojure unifies a lot of operations on diverse data structures and this compensates a lot for this scratch to s-expr esthetic. Just for this advantage, I will never cry in despair for the lack of car, cdr, cadr and other siblings... We used to have an Algol-60 compiler on the DEC-10 and event in the 1980s it was seldom used, mainly to show some compiler/language principles. I would never attempted to create a dialect based on Algo and hope that it flies. Algol is unknown to the majority of coders these days, they're more familiar with Java hence the edge that Clojure has compared to other Lisp dialects. Most people have a great lack of historical perspective so for them anything coming up on the market are "new" concepts. Who remembers Simula-67 ? I do because I worked with it so when C++ and then Java came up those object concepts were not surprises for me but it was for many of my younger co-workers at the time. Everyone was looking at this stuff as the latest Ferrari, for me it looked like a revamped Ford model T. For me many aspects of the Java language were annoying because of my previous experience with Simula-67 but for newcomers it was not an issue. For them it looked like the 8th marvel of the world... It's not only a taste issue, it's about habits and mind flexibility. Like any new language (I'm up to around 15 excluding half a dozen assembly languages) I had to bend my mind a bit to learn Clojure but no need to get myself lobotomized here :))) Luc On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 14:22 +0100, Konrad Hinsen wrote: > On Nov 17, 2008, at 13:56, Simon Brooke wrote: > > > However, you're dead wrong about Lots of Irritating Stupid > > Parentheses. They are the heart of the language: the fact that it does > > not need any irregular syntax, because everything is regular. > > For me, the heart of Lisp is that code is expressed in terms of data > structures, i.e. that there is no separate syntax for code and data. > Clojure respects that principle. > > While it is true that Clojure's syntax is slightly less regular than > other Lisps' in using both lists and vectors to define code, that is > a minor issue for me, and my experience is that Clojure code is > definitely easier to read than other Lisps because of this. > > Of course, the only universally true statement about syntax is that > it is a matter of taste... > > Konrad. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
