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Comment by japherwocky | Hacker News Reader

I think there are about 666 parentheses in those code examples.. I don't get the appeal of Clojure?

You don't really see the parens after a while. Clojure's appeal goes beyond its syntax, as I'm sure does whichever language you prefer.

Curiously, the equivalent code in most other languages has about the same number of parens.

Just to be troublesome: Ruby has implicit parens where possible, and none for defining loops :) Even including {} where applicable (single-line loops / anonymous functions), we're still talking likely significantly below 1/2.

For fun I was whipping up some haskell one-liners as I read along.

You can just do:

    let fibs = 1 : 1 : [ fibs !! n + fibs !! (n - 1) | n <- [1..] ]

for the Fibonacci sequence and

    take 10 $ iterate (succ . recip) 1

for the first 10 iterations of the continued fraction.

To me these read much more clearly but then I haven't written anything big in a lispy language yet.

There are all sorts of ways to do it; for instance, I really like the following:

    (def fibo (map second 
                   (iterate (fn [[x y]] [y (+ x y)]) [0 1])))

I just went with a different version for the article to show another way of doing it that might be clearer to someone new to Clojure. As for understanding/ease of reading, the Haskell version is a little more alien to me, but that's because I haven't spent much time in Haskell.

Once again, for your CF ex:

    (take 10 (iterate (comp inc /) 1))

Which gives ratios in Clojure, not doubles. Both elegant solutions, definitely. I just wanted to use my GCF, which could probably be made to look a little nicer as well. This post was more about playing around with the Golden Ratio than writing sexy code (though admittedly, I probably could have done better in many places!)

Haskell is a really cool language: I'm making my way through Real World Haskell right now!

Lisp syntax is trivial for programs and if you use a proper and consistent indentation style ... I get the impression that it's somewhat akin to Python once "[y]ou don't really see the parens".

Which is indeed what happened with me, I saw indentation and would e.g. use that to get the right number of closing parens in a function and at the same time detect a certain class of mistakes.

Give a Lisp an honest try (Scheme is simpler than Clojure) and you might find it works for you.

It won't make sense until you make a concerted effort to learn lisp. Dig into "The Little Schemer". It's enlightening. And fun.

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