Re:Not Lisp again (2009)
by int_19h on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:08PM
(#14251527)
I find the argument that Lisp needing fewer symbols means that it's simpler to be suspect. Imagine if we took English, and replaced all punctuation with parentheses. Would it be "simpler"? In some very academic way, probably. I'm not at all confident it would actually be easier to read.
This is really something that needs input from people who professionally deal with the way our brains process visual information, especially text. It might be that there's value in having more varied and fancy punctuation, e.g. because the differences between ( and [ and { serve as anchor points for visual pattern matching.
It would be interesting to have an experiment whereby people not previously exposed to any PL have to analyze a code snippet in, say, Lisp vs JS vs Python side by side, and discover its structure (e.g. by drawing it as a block diagram).
This is really something that needs input from people who professionally deal with the way our brains process visual information, especially text. It might be that there's value in having more varied and fancy punctuation, e.g. because the differences between ( and [ and { serve as anchor points for visual pattern matching.
It would be interesting to have an experiment whereby people not previously exposed to any PL have to analyze a code snippet in, say, Lisp vs JS vs Python side by side, and discover its structure (e.g. by drawing it as a block diagram).