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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people liked Lisp concepts but couldn't stand the syntax. One thing I keep telling people to try is wrap it in a better syntax hiding the ugly parts. Seeing Lisp in Julia, a language mainstream developers might embrace, brought a big smile to my face. Need more attempts. :)

Another language that tried this with a syntax change was Dylan. People interested in that can try OpenDylan.

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I've been coding for years using a preprocessor that eliminates most parentheses: Indentation implies parentheses. A pipe "|" opens a parenthesis that auto-closes at the end of that line or at the next ")". A dollar "$" opens a parenthesis that auto-closes when the indentation recovers. The result has a lighter, more poetic look than any language I know, and the parentheses that are left actually matter, so I pay attention to them.

I've seen other proposals online, but they felt untested to me. Leave out either "|" or "$" and the above system gets clumsy. I check for the equivalent of "$" in other proposals exactly as I check for marrow in a stew recipe: Did they really think this through?

One can't change existing habits. An idea that appeals to me: Write a Lisp preprocessor for Rust, and happen to use this syntax.

Can you post a link to an example? This sounds like something I could use for my all-too-common convenience hacks, but I can't quite envision it just from the description.

Why not o-expressions? http://breuleux.net/blog/oexprs.html

Lisp without s-expressions is like bathwater without a baby.

S-expressions enable homo-iconic macros and make compile-time computing super easy! I spent 35 years programming in C and C-like languages and then developed my own Common Lisp implementation (http://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git) - the only Common Lisp that interoperates with C++ and uses llvm as the backend. When I started with lisp I wrestled with the syntax and sweet-expressions and just decided to let it go. Now I've found language love all over again!

In a world that runs on Javascript, nobody should be able to complain about a few measly parentheses.

Obligatory relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/297/

you get all the good properties of lisp with a syntax that leaves some parentheses implicit but unambiguous (meaning that a preprocessor can add them back as the first step).

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