So many people start out thinking like this when they learn Clojure or some other Lisp and then after like 2-4 weeks of reading Lisp code, any C-like code starts to look comparatively irregular and Lisp feels much easier to read.
I recommend Clojure/ClojureScript. It's quite practical for web development and also an excellent gateway into functional programming.
Here is one anecdata. When my daughter was 14 I taught her a Lisp and then a traditional programming language. She found the random syntax of the trad formatted language bizarre.
Two things were important to make it "click" for me:
1) I realized that "Lisp has many parentheses" actually has it backwards. A Lisp code has about as many parentheses as an equivalent Java code; there is almost a 1:1 relation. It just has less of... unnecessary things. Which results in more "parentheses per square meter", but from this perspective that is a good thing!
2) Some people complain that dense code is more difficult to read. But you don't have to turn everything into one-liners! You can format it into just as many lines as the Java code would have, except the lines will be much shorter now, and therefore easier to read. In Java, you don't have much freedom with formatting, because a typical statement takes more that half of the screen width, so you are stuck with one long column. Lisp with shorter statements gives you more freedom. You can abuse it to write hard-to-read code. You can also use it to design beautiful code that is easy to read. Also, there is a huge difference in legibility of a code that fits in one screen (so you can see it whole at once) and one that does not; and the Lisp functions are shorter on average.
function doSomething(a, b) {/* something! */}
const doSomething = (a, b) => {/* whatever */}
const doSomething = (a, b) => b => “some closure”;
(defn do-something [a b] (fn [b] “some clojure”))
To me at least, (fn-name args) was both more readable and makes more sense than fnName(args) after a few days, and I never learned a lisp until I was 37. Maybe I just found a style preference later in life, marking me as a lisp survivor. Maybe we’ve just been doing it wrong for decades and have grown accustomed to it. I can’t say. But the power of the language itself coupled with the code editing features it enables makes me think that the whole field has been on the wrong track, or maybe even off the rails, for decades.
The JS code I write now is more flexible, more resilient, more testable, and more maintainable as a result of learning Clojure. I doubt anyone can say the opposite: that a C-style language improved their understanding of lisp. (Not addressing you with this part, dear poster, since your gripe is rooted in the syntax.)
[NaN] “kids these days“ is just friendly ribbing. I’ve got the grey beard now, so I‘m free to play the part. Language maintainers tend to be older, and we cause more problems.
I don't see how you can argue otherwise. It is as if you have no clue at all about how UX works. You can't get used to everything, there is a hierarchy of syntaxes, and lisp syntax is just plain bad for humans.
Yet many people will still adamantly say that they find salad tastier. And still go on and eat cake and get fat. They are just lying to themselves, I'm not sure why. Lispers are the same way, its just a reality distortion field.
Have you ever programmed a decently sized lisp program using an editor that allowed you to work at the AST level?
Until then, there's just a large probability, regardless of how tasty cake is, that your displaying classic ignorance.
I don't really get this argument. It's not any harder to read `(if foo` than it is to read `if (foo)`. It's purely a matter of what you've gotten used. I don't think it's an objective measure, it's purely about what you've already trained your brain to pattern-match on.
> and has much more focus on text over symbols than other languages
Funny how you get the exact opposite complaint about languages like Perl.
Return the maximum value of the array “numbers”. The languages are listed in descending order of text > symbol.
Clojure:
(apply max numbers)
Math.max(...numbers);
⌈/ 4 3 2 7 5 1 3
⌈ numbers
Furthermore, how is this
(if a
true-cond
false-cond)
if (a) {
trueCond
} else {
falseCond
}