Is it possible that people are confusing their inability to comprehend deeply nested function calls (no offense intended by that - I hit this often myself) with the strangeness of the perens? I think what others have said about having to think more about each line of Clojure is true. It is more expressive and information-dense. The remedy to this though is not to eliminate the perens syntax, but to use intermediate defs and defns to break up the logic into manageable chunks. These defs would also make the code more self documenting, by associating names with information.
As someone who's never learned a lisp before, I find myself warming up quickly to the perens syntax. I think that it's appropriate that a language which takes a completely different approach should also have a different syntax than what I'm used to. I don't think that "it might offend some people" is a valid argument for stripping out a core element of the language syntax. If they're not willing to come out of their comfort zones on such a minor detail then they probably aren't very receptive to functional programming in the first place. And that's my $0.02. :-) -Brandon On Dec 19, 10:21 am, David Nolen <dnolen.li...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 8:25 AM, 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. > > I don't think anybody in the Clojure community wants to Clojure to be a > fringe language. Considering the ML now has about 3K subscribers (up 2500 > from 14 months ago) I think Rich Hickey and the community have done a fair > job touting it's advantages. > > However, there are somethings about every language that you just have to > accept. Lisp's parentheses are one of those things. For example, it's really > not worth complaining about Python's enforcement of significant whitespace. > Sure people sing it praises now, but to this day there still fruitless > discussions about the matter mostly initiated by people with only a passing > familiarity of the language. > > > 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. > > You are not the first to bring up the concern about parentheses and you will > certainly not be the last. My advice would be to let the matter drop. People > who aren't going to learn Lisp just because it has parentheses aren't going > to be converted. But from the variety of programmers on this list, parens > are not a significant deterrant for programmers coming from the background > of Java, Scala, JavaScript, C, C++, Objective-C, OCaml, Haskell, Prolog, > Erlang, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. > > > > > Martin > > > -- > > 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<clojure%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > > For more options, visit this group at > >http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -- 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
