> Looking at all the parens of even that simple lisp factorial, and I realize that I'm feeling a lot of cognitive load that would simply never go away, because the punctuation doesn't let me filter any of it out. I'd have to read everything more carefully.
Completely the opposite here.
Parens means function call or list. Lists usually denoted by a quote first.
I don't read the parens, I skim everything, reading words. And the punctuation is really simple.
For example:
if (number? a)
+ a b
error "Not A Number" a
Scheme has the very least syntax out of just about any programming language I've used. It has a tiny cognitive load compared to most.
>You know how, when you're reading natural language, you don't actually read individual letters, not once you have any reading fluency?
As difficult as it is to imagine, you can indeed achieve fluency in reading Lisp code. Like with everything else, it takes time and practice.
Focus on the words, not the punctuation, just like you do when reading natural language.
Re:Not Lisp again (2009)
by spacemanmatt on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:08PM
(#14252473)
You get used to reading lisp, the same as you get used to reading all that boilerplate syntax.
You know how, when you're reading natural language, you don't actually read individual letters, not once you have any reading fluency? That's how I read code, too, I'm realizing. When I see the parentheses in C#, my brain just goes "oh that's a method/function call" and I can either skip over the contents of the parens or read them if I need to. Reading comprehension is pretty quick.
Looking at all the parens of even that simple lisp factorial, and I realize that I'm feeling a lot of cognitive load that would simply never go away, because the punctuation doesn't let me filter any of it out. I'd have to read everything more carefully.