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Fabio Manganiello

@ramin_hal9001 @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane I've tried to learn LISP dialects for the past 20 years or so, and I've always failed.

I mean, I can definitely read some Common LISP, Scheme or Clojure code by now, and I've even debugged somebody else's code occasionally. But when it comes to writing, all those nested parenthesis and operators in an unintuitive order just keep shouting "unnecessary cognitive burden" to me :)

2 comments
Ramin Honary

@blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane the parentheses are an essential part of the language, being that one of the distinguishing features of any Lisp is the ability to write code that transforms parts of your program into other forms before it runs (sometimes while it runs). You can do this with any programming language of course, but Lisp's minimal syntax makes it easier to do for both the programmer and the compiler — meaning a lower cognitive burden for the programmer, and also a smaller, more efficient memory footprint for compiled binaries.

Once you get used to it, nothing could be more intuitive than the elegant, minimalist syntax of Lisp.

@blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane the parentheses are an essential part of the language, being that one of the distinguishing features of any Lisp is the ability to write code that transforms parts of your program into other forms before it runs (sometimes while it runs). You can do this with any programming language of course, but Lisp's minimal syntax makes it easier to do for both the programmer and the compiler — meaning a lower cognitive burden for the programmer, and also a smaller,...

Threadbane

@ramin_hal9001 @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo
Never learned or used Lisp, although I have seen a Lisp listing from a project a coworker was on. Cool.

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