Mark Volkmann <r.mark.volkm...@gmail.com> writes: > The parens don't bother me. My concern though is that many people > won't take the time to learn Clojure primarily because of the parens.
Rule one of programming: never code anything you're not going to use yourself. Unless you're getting paid to do it. Or something. > The preprocessor would appease those people and not change anything > for those that like Clojure just fine as it is. Not really. People who use this preprocessor would still have to learn to read Clojure code. And presumably these people would be releasing libraries, so this would affect the Real Clojure programmers as well. Nothing happens in a vacuum. This idea gets proposed to various segments of the Lisp community with astonishing regularity[1]. AFAIK the only time it ever went anywhere (for some value of "went anywhere" at least) was with Dylan[2]. Needless to say, this did nothing to increase the appeal of Dylan to the language community at large and really only alienated people who actually understood Lisp. I hate to sound like a Smug Lisp Weenie™, but if people want to learn Clojure, they're going to have to get comfortable with its syntax. Parentheses aren't some embarrassing historical accident; they're part of the reason lisps are so powerful. -Phil [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html http://www.lispin.org/ http://www.archub.org/noparen.arc http://pschombe.wordpress.com/2006/04/16/lisp-without-parentheses/ ... and many more. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_programming_language --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
