That becomes a no true Scotsman fallacy though. People argue "Either you like lisp syntax or you haven't used it enough to have a valid opinion". That is a bullshit argument.
Obviously opinions on the language shouldn't be given too much weight if a person hasn't spent too much time investigating/ using it.
As a non-JavaScript person, all the JavaScript examples looks like gobbledygook unless I sit down and consciously think about what the examples are showing, and it kinda hurts my head a bit, but I can slowly force myself through it.
But as someone with a few years of lisp under my belt, even the closure examples (and I've never used clojure) parse pretty close the speed of thought.
It really is hard to explain to someone who hasn't used lisp for 6-12 months, but there really is a lisp "enlightenment" experience, which is totally unlike anything I've experienced with any of my other languages. I'm not saying this makes it better or worse than other languages, but I am saying it's real, and that lisp code is not only parsable, but exceptionally so to an experienced lisp programmer. One day you're sitting there thinking there's a whole lot of brackets, balancing and indentation in this godforsaken language, and then something just clicks over in your brain and you don't even see the brackets any more and it's all just data structure, and you see the shape of it, and you say to yourself "well that was pretty fucking cool" and from that day on you don't really see the brackets any more, it's all just names, indentation and data structures.
edit: and it should also be recognised that an editor implementing parentheses balancing, indentation options, and keyword lookup/ completion also becomes a relatively trivial exercise when your code consists of variable names and structured data.
In my experience, the Lisp enlightenment comes in stages, two big ones are 1) s-expression parsing you describe here, and 2) grokking "code is data".
WRT. s-expressions enlightenment, I vividly remember when it happened to me. Few months into learning Lisp, I bought a hardcover SICP and, for some reason, decided to do exercises in it on paper. Few exercises in, as I was writing Lisp code with a pen in hand, suddenly something clicked in my head - like my brain JIT-compiled a new processing module - and from then on, I no longer needed to mentally count or track the parens. I just knew how many and where they were, it dropped to semiconscious level. Ever since, I'm very comfortable with s-expressions; in fact, I prefer them as a notation to Algol/C-like code.
I think no matter the language the syntax will disappear over time and your brain will learn to look at the character matrix and directly see logical constructs, moreover this will always apply cross-language to other languages with similar syntax. Fit example, I primarily work in TS, I have decent amount of experience in other C-style, and to me Rust is easily readable with very little experience actually using it.
I don't think anyone who write Lisp-like languages professionally doesn't use tools like parinfer/paraedit, where balancing parenthesis is not something you have to do.
Not with him.
But I might be wrong here, it's simply hard for me to imagine someone writing with lisps professionally going the route of textual editing when structural editing is right there.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/EDUG-M/html/edus...
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/EDUG-M/html/edus...
Gerald Jay Sussman
You wrote a really nice comment ages ago, which partly inspired me to learn lisp and also it’s formatting.
I still want clean it up a fair bit, but here’s the draft article:
https://ashokkhanna-530.medium.com/formatting-lisp-5e28020b8...
Hope it’s okay to use your quote! And if not, I’ll take it down
Ex french & english vs french & indonesian. English and french can recognize words from each other and kind of see some similar grammar rules (the medicine vs. la médecine) while with indonesian those moments are not as frequent.