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But that's exactly the root of the complaint. Because there's (for the sake of argument) only one syntactic concept, there's no bandwidth for structural concepts to be visible in the syntax. If you're used to a wide variety of symbols carrying the structural meaning (and we're humans, we can cope with that) then `)))))))` has such low information density as to be a problematic road bump. It's not that the syntax is hard to learn, it's that everything else you need to build a program gets flattened and harder to understand as a result.

Even among lisps this has been problematic, you can look at common lisp's LOOP macro as an attempt to squeeze more structural meaning into a non-S-expression format.

by gorjusborg7 hours ago|

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This guy gets it.

The syntax argument is such a tired argument. With LISPy language there is almost zero syntax, it's pretty much executable AST.

Because of this, formatting matters a lot, but I don't think that's too different than other languages.

If you think LISP is hard to read, you are someone who could most benefit from branching out to a non-Algol lineage language.

Also, the little syntax present is pretty much timeless. Learn once and its yours for the next 50 years.

by ux2664785 hours ago|

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> With LISPy language there is almost zero syntax

To be pedantic, this isn't quite correct. Syntax isn't countable like that. What S-expressions are light on is production rules. At their most basic they have IIRC 7 production rules but there are absolutely 0 languages based on s-expressions which are that simple, since it doesn't give you anything like quasiquotes, vectors, Lisp 2 function resolution, etc. Reader macros make matters much worse.

What we can say is that they are constructively simple, but not particularly unique in that. Once you get into real sexpr languages they aren't simpler than horn clauses, and are constructively more complex than languages like Brainfuck and Forth.

by thunky7 hours ago|

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> The syntax argument is such a tired argument.

It's repeated a lot because it's true. The collective developer world has decided that LISP syntax is not the preference. Good if you prefer it, but you're the in the overwhelming minority.

Random example i just found via github explore: https://github.com/replikativ/datahike/blob/main/src/datahik...

You probably love it but to me it looks like a wall of text. Sure I can figure out what it does, but it gives me a headache.

by epgui5 hours ago|

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It’s not true, unless you have an unusual definition of “syntax”. Lisp basically has the most minimal syntax possible, by design.

To use the right words: it’s not a syntax issue, it just looks unfamiliar to you.

by joshlemer4 hours ago|

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I think this is kind of misleading. Yes s-expressions have very simple syntax in and of themselves. But s-expressions are not all that's required to get all the control structures in Clojure. You need to memorize all the special forms and all the standard macros that people use on a day to day basis. And they're just as hard (actually IME harder) to memorize as any other syntax. let, cond, record, if, condp, let-if, fn, def, defn, loop, recur, if-some, when-let, for, ->, ->>, as->>, cond-> ...

To this day I have to look up whenever I get back into clojure what the "syntax" is of ns, require, import, etc.

by epgui3 hours ago|

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Remembering macros is much more like remembering functions than syntax.

by midnight_eclair5 hours ago|

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i can link you similarly undecipherable walls of text in rust and zig and c

but i bet if you sat down a junior developer not yet entrenched in any style yet, they'd be able to grok lisp code MUCH faster than the intricacies of syntax of the other alternatives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯