Re:History of Lisp Parentheses (2019)
by JonChesterfield on Thursday February 02, 2023 @08:34AM
(#34626271)
And when you want to write programs that move or translate subexpressions, it is so much easier when you aren't converting to and from a stream of bytes or tokens on the fly as well.
Programming is, as everyone here knows, a thinking discipline first...
But when you do formulate a thought, you want the typing, navigation and editing to be as fluent, fast and expressive as possible.
You want to extract and move sub expressions without friction. You want to jump around the code and “zoom” in and out of contexts. And of course evaluate every sub expression in isolation.
All of this stuff is just much harder or limited without something like S-expressions.