Re:Lisp's reputation is so bad that many people don't even t...
by davidw on Tuesday April 07, 2009 @05:30AM
(#550665)
Notepad is exactly what I'm talking about. With Perl, C, and Ruby, at least, there really aren't any indentation rules - your program will work fine even if you don't put any in at all, or do a hacky job of it. With Lisp, especially when modifying someone else's code you're stuck counting parens.
Oh, also a weird (maybe crackpot?:-) theory of mine: parenthesis, graphically, don't form a nice, rigid vertical line, but sort of point diagonally, possibly making it just that much harder to see how they line up. In any case, 4 or 8 space indented C/Tcl/Ruby/whatever code is certainly more obvious to the eye.
I disagree, with a caveat--writing code using a terrible editor requires knowledge of the indentation rules for the language, regardless of whether that language is a lisp, Perl, Ruby, etc.
However (the caveat), although the indentation rules for Perl, C, Python are relatively simple (indent after a '{' or ':', line up arguments), each function/macro in a lisp can have different indenting rules (e.g. in CL compare `let' to `multiple-value-bind' to functions, to lists, to the various `with-*' macros, etc).
Once you know the library for a specific implementation, the indentation rules become more obvious; at this point, using (e.g.) Notepad isn't particularly terrible (until that knowledge is acquired, though, yikes).