Pixie: A sweet Clojure-ish language

Re:Pixie: A sweet Clojure-ish language by NhanH on Monday March 09, 2015 @06:32AM (#9170176)

I don't know where this trick come from, but I've read it a long time ago, and you might find it helpful.

Lisp languages in fact have the same(ish) amount of parentheses as any other language, the trick is that the placement slightly differ: the opening parentheses come before the function name, rather than after it. Ie foo(bar) => (foo bar) . foo(bar(baz)) => (foo (bar baz)).

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Re:Pixie: A sweet Clojure-ish language by bbradley406 on Monday March 09, 2015 @08:35AM (#9170526)

This trick is very helpful, but I would argue that there are still a lot more parentheses due to almost everything being written as a function in lisp. When I started programming in Racket arithmetic and comparison expressions tripped me up frequently. My tip to beginners in this area would be to use the dot-notation first, then switch to the standard way once comfortable. for example:

    (20 . > . (10 . / . 5))

may be more clear than

    (> 20 (/ 10 5))

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