71–80 of 203 posts
The lisp style syntax is jarring
It requires a much different line of thinking to be applicable in the real world, which goes against historic human nature of following specific instructions, one instruction at a time.
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Normal people prefer syntax-less, unambiguous lisp-languages over the mess we have now. Just look at Javascript, rust or C++ and tell me normal people prefer that. Only worse languages win, because people are masochochists, but throwing away this possible user base is always a win.
var distance = sqrt(x * x + y * y) That is something very similar they may had in high school.
It's a shame the new Lisps tend to not rip off Common Lisp's type system, being able to declare my types and having SBCL admonish me when I'm doing something stupid is something I would hate to lose.
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The empirical evident would be against you, as tens of millions of programmers prefer writing code in those other languages that lack the parent :-)
They may or may not. I prefer lisp, but I mostly program in TypeScript and Go. My theory is that if most programmers tried lisp for a month or two, they’d end up preferring it.
I don't end to find myself -writing- lisp very often but in a lot of cases I end up -thinking- in lisp and then translating across to whatever language I'm implementing in before I start typing.
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I think its a pretty nice language. Those extra bits of syntax that makes it "not a lisp" are mostly around defining "not list" kind if data structures. I find it practical.
What data structure isn't just a list with extra steps?
I think the language is unreadable. For me, the purpose of a programming language is to let a human talk to a machine. Show me (for instance) control flow for the example function on the home page. It just isn't making things easier
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I think its a pretty nice language. Those extra bits of syntax that makes it "not a lisp" are mostly around defining "not list" kind if data structures. I find it practical.
Lisp usually has a lot of non-list data structures like arrays. records, strings, classes/objects, hashtables, ... For some data structures there is built-in syntax and with an extensible reader (the extensible parser for s-expressions) the user can add additional syntax. Janet uses a non-extensible parser for the data syntax. What Janet makes a 'not really a Lisp' is that "LISP" stands for "List Processor". Janet is…