On 19 dec, 15:25, Martin Coxall <pseudo.m...@me.com> wrote: > > I guess it's mostly a matter of judging a language by its long-term > > merits instead of initial appearance -- just like with so many other > > things in life. > > That - right there - is a tacit admission that the Clojure community will > find it actively desirable that it remain a minority language, so we can all > feel smug that we understand something those poor average programmers were > too simple to see. > > You know there's nothing wrong with allowing Clojure to display its elegance > upfront, rather than making programmers work for it like it's some > Presbytarian admission exam.
Most programming languages aren't judged on their syntactical elegance, otherwise nobody would use Erlang, for example. Now I like Erlang, but I still think it just looks horrible and it has way too many syntactical niggles that are hard to get familiar with. Lisp languages are completely simple in that regard. The worst question you generally run into is whether to add 1 or 2 pairs of parentheses at some point. Clojure makes this a bit simpler in the generally-used cases and a bit harder overall (since it uses 4+ different kinds of delimiters) Now that does not mean it doesn't look "alien". It does. Deal with it or do something else. But don't pretend that doing what clojure *does* is much easier to write or read in any kind of "familiar" syntax, unless you're got a really serious contender. It's been tried many times - McCarthy himself did not think s-expressions were the final syntax for the language - but nobody has been able to come up with a syntax that actually works better for Lisp. Once everything is an expression - and especially when you place a large emphasis on side-effect free code - all you can really do to improve the "parenthesis problem" is to compact typical constructs. We've already got macros and decent reader syntax. -- 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
