Martin Coxall <pseudo.m...@me.com> writes: > I trust the many, many more people that have rejected Lisp for its > hostile syntax and delusions of importance than the statistically > insignificant minority who have actually stuck with it.
Sometimes people are just looking for excuse to criticize. Before it was considered mainstream, there was just as much noise about Python and whitespace-sensitivity and the explicit "self" in method arguments as there is about Clojure and parens. > But I'm trying to think of it from the point of view of Joe Q. Coder, > who will take one look at our beloved elegant, expressive Clojure, see > all the parens and run screaming. Take away the parens and that same Joe Q. Coder is likely to pick something else to take one look at and run away screaming. Perhaps the JVM, perhaps immutability, perhaps the whitespace-sensitive syntax. I'm not telling you not to try it. If you can pull off a preprocessor or much better an editor, that makes Clojure code _significantly_ easier to read while retaining its expressiveness, simplicity of macro writing and tool support then I will join you in using and championing it. But this is the same "great idea" that everyone who's ever used a lisp since the dawn of programming has come up with and despite numerous attempts, to my knowledge not a single one of them has ever taken off. That doesn't mean it's not possible, just that it's not going to be as simple as just allowing "others" to write whitespace-sensitive Clojure. The reaction you are seeing from the old-school lispers (of which I am not one, unless 4 months is "old") is understandable. It's the same sort of reaction you would get from an old-school Python programmer if you jumped on the Python mailing list and declared that you've solved the significant-whitespace problem: allow newcomers to write Python code with lisp-like parens. ;-) -- 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
