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Comment by tomlin | Hacker News Reader

I'll take the downvotes, and no disrespect to the project itself - but only to the falling-over-self comments about ClojureScript.

If you care about semantics at all, or even want your code readable by someone who is in their early days of trying to understand and learn code - it's just ugly and hard to read.

I've been coding since I was 14, and I don't feel bad in saying that I can't tell you what this line does without looking it up. (reset! caret-location nil)))) I can't imagine how you could argue this is good and adheres to any philosophy of openness or readability.

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Your comment implies that you’re only familiar with C-style curly brace languages.

ClojureScript is a Lisp language. If you’ve never learned one, I highly recommend it. It will make you think about programming differently.

As esr puts it in his (in)famous “How To Become A Hacker”:

“LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.”

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills1

For myself, I learned Scheme (another Lisp-like language) in graduate school through the How to Design Programs curriculum (http://htdp.org/), which despite already being a professional programmer, I found enlightening. And then again in the online programming languages course from Brown: https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/.

LISP is super easy for humans and machines to parse which makes it readable and I'd be hard-pressed to call it ugly for that reason--I think it's pretty darn easy to read having fairly small exposure to LISPs. I personally prefer ML-family syntax and never liked the ergonomics of working with parentheses, especially in Vim, but I agree the parent comment reeks of exposure bias making claims about what others know and should feel comfortable with.

> LISP is super easy for humans and machines to parse

You have to choose 1, it’s either easy to parse for machines or for humans, not both. Any kind of lisp is harder to parse for humans.

Programming languages in which line breaks and indentation are not significant are hard to parse for humans, period.

Take any Javascript or C program, and remove the line breaks so that it's just a linear string of tokens. It's no harder for the parse for the machine. Much harder for you.

Humans parse non-trivial examples of Lisp using indentation clues that the machine ignores, just like in the case of a large number of language families.

Not all structure in programs is indicated with indentation; sufficiently small chunks of programs are written on one line. The structure of those chunks is easy for humans to understand accurately if they are written in Lisp because there is no ambiguity.

Lisp syntax also has a way to break any expression, no matter how small, into multiple lines with indentation. Any two Lisp programmers will do it the same way:

  (+ (* x
        x)
     (/ y
        z))

there are no questions like "do I put the slash at the end of the previous line"?

If you can't understand some one-line chunk of code, you can get it into a canonical indented form, and this can be automated.

If it's so easy, why are none of the early code learning platforms employing Lisp or Clojure? An honest answer is that it's too hard to read for children who are learning. It's not easy, saying it is doesn't make it so. Ask a kid if it's easy.

HtDP uses Racket and scales from graduate school to middle school children. Part of the reason they use Racket Scheme is that it is extremely easy to teach the syntax.

As for why it's not used more widely, same reasons Lisp like languages aren't used more often in industry: inertia, fear, worse-is-better syndrome.

Scheme was literally one of the OG languages to teach to beginners. As an English speaker, I've nested parentheses is normal writing, so it shouldn't be a foreign concept.

I have been writing code for several decades. Never managed to learn LISP due to a parentheses embargo with Naboo.

> I don't feel bad in saying that I can't tell you what this line does without looking it up.

This is something that you could learn in a single minute.

It's faster to learn than all the languages you know.

> (reset! caret-location nil))))

The C version is reset(caret_location, nil)

Or to be more precise, reset(caret_location, nil))))

Maybe null or NIL instead of nil, maybe not.

It's barely different. And the exclamation point is just part of the function's name. I'm not sure what's so confusing.

An exclamation point being part of a function's name is certainly surprising to me. It would be like learning that `foo[5]` was a function named `foo[` being called 5x or something..

(Apparently it's a ClojureScript convention to put an exclamation point on impure functions.)

Even though the blog is syntax highlighted?

Exclamation marks are also used in Ruby to differentiate between mutating methods vs those that return a transformed copy. So, `array.sort` vs `array.sort!`. Question marks are also used, but more aesthetically vs functionally: there are `array.empty?` and `array.include?` but no `array.empty` or `array.include`.

Swift allows unicode in symbols, so you can name functions with emoji. Thankfully that hasn’t caught on.

J has a similar idea–built into the language syntax vs using characters in function names–where a period can be used to inflect a primitive.

It's not about having an open mind. I teach children to code, and you'll notice that there are ZERO early coding learning platforms that take a Lisp/Clojure approach. Do you think that is a coincidence or because it's an ugly language that people can't easily read at an early age?

Surely you would also say that Chinese is "ugly and hard to read", if all you've ever seen are Latin-family languages?

It's a Lisp. Takes 5 minutes to learn the syntax - but only if you have an open mind.

(My daily work is in a C-derived language, but I have zero problems parsing Python, Lisp, or even APL if I need to. )

That's a poor comparison, given that reading Chinese requires you to memorize thousands of symbols that have little internal consistency or rules to deduce their meaning. It's _actually_ really hard and time intensive to learn to read. That doesn't make it ugly of course. Just not well suited for the analogy you're trying to make. I guess Arabic would be a better fit here, since it has an alphabet, if I'm not mistaken.

That's down to popularity more than anything else.

"I've been coding since I was 14, and I don't feel bad in saying ... I can't imagine how you could argue this is good and adheres to any philosophy of openness or readability." is like saying "I have experience, therefore that invalidates any experience you might have."

If you don't have any interest in perspectives outside of your own then I can't imagine learning anything can be easy at all.

Since I come from a school where scheme was taught as a first language, I find clojurescript a hell of a lot easier to read than javascript. Half the time I feel like javascript just does things out in the aether with side-effects and I find the code really hard to follow when it does. Clojurescript has a much easier to follow flow for me.

That doesn't mean javascript is ugly and hard to read for someone else.

It's more like "I want the world to understand code, and I don't think we get here with bougie languages that divide learning instead of emboldening it." Language should be easy, it shouldn't be a ring-kissing circle jerk. Clojure is not on any early learning platforms. There's a reason for that. Children don't understand brackets, cause you know, children. If you look at the data on children learning languages, Lisp and languages like it actually divert wouldbe programmers away. Not something I consider positive.

You seem to be pushing the children narrative very strongly, as if it were some deciding factor on what languages adults should learn for their own pleasure and what not. At no point was this article directed at children. If you do not like Lispy languages and find them hard to understand, that's totally fine, but that is every bit your problem, not mine.

Let's completely forget for a second that the article wasn't basically prescribing ClojureScript as a omnisolution that we're all dumb for not converting to - it was my opposition that the point is ignorant of 99.5% of the rest of the world. His argument was that is was readable - it isn't. Again, ask someone who's learning whether it's readable. And I better not find you in a thread, arguing that semantic HTML is far superior while you flog for a non-semantic language.

I think you are delusional. Me writing in a blog post that I like Clojure and I recommend you trying it is very far removed from "prescribing ClojureScript as a omnisolution" especially as I specifically mention that all I write also applies in regular JS and React.js. If a friend recommends you try out a beer he/she likes, are they also prescribing that beer as an omnisolution? Because that's what you're saying. Ridiculous. Go yell at someone else for writing a blog post in a programming language you don't understand. There's a lot of blog posts to yell at out there. And I'm sure they didn't consult children before writing them as well! The tragedy!

It's not a readable, semantic language. You can dance around it with all kinds of gish-gallop.

If a friend recommends you try a beer, and you can't read the label, I guess that makes the beer more attractive? okay.

Clojure is hardly bougie or a circle jerk considering it's focus on pragmatism. The first programming language taught in both my highschool and college was PLT-Scheme (now Racket), which is arguably more bougie than clojure considering its' academic focus as a PL research language.

Zero people dropped out in HS. In college I'm pretty sure you're going to have people dropping out of the intro course for programming no matter what language you choose when it's taught in 60-100 student lectures with professors and TAs that have been steeped in CS so long they no longer remember what being a beginner is like.

Why would you expect to know what a line of code does in a language you've never used without looking it up? If you've ever used hooks in react it is roughly equivalent to setCaretLocation(null).

> it's just ugly and hard to read.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. But, like I mentioned in another comment here, it seems odd to me to criticise on the merit of choice of language on a programmers forum.

I teach children to code, and you'll notice that there are ZERO early coding learning platforms that take a Lisp/Clojure approach. Do you think that is a coincidence or because it's an ugly language that people can't easily read at an early age?

I think it's market effects and nothing else. Schools teach first and foremost the skills that are easily employable. Hence why most schools teach either Java or JavaScript these days. Whether or not something is nice to read (btw, what does this even mean? Your lack of experience is not an indication of how "easy to read" something is) has pretty much nothing to do with it. I hope this is not the attitude you teach children with, because if you think something you do not understand is by default ugly, you have bigger problems than my small blog post.

I also do not write my blog for children to read. In fact, I don't even have a target audience - it's all "I had a problem and this is how I solved it", and perhap some Clojurian finds my posts on Google and finds it interesting. I certainly know there are Lisp-likers here on HN, as well.

Code should be for everyone - not just a few ring-kissers who feel they have past a certain integrity threshold - or maybe better said, you think Lisp is some sort of Master Sword that you pulled out of the rock - so therefore, it must be better.

What does "nice to read" mean? It means that I don't spend another 2 hours falling over myself trying to convince 7 year olds why being decisively pedantic is better than more expressive, semantic code.

You're still caught up in the idea that coding and programming is for an elite group of people, and that perspective is boring and old.

That's a pretty weird approach to take imo. So you see the world through the lens of a 7 year-old? So we should not teach anyone advanced math either because a 7 year-old wouldn't understand it? Perhaps people shouldn't drive a car, because a 7 year-old wouldn't know how! Listen, I can learn and write about whatever programming languages I like, without having to once think about you or the children you teach.

You can label me elitist, you can label me however you like, but as a teacher you have a funny way to suppress people's ability to share knowledge on the basis that you or your children don't understand it. Shouldn't you as a teacher be happy that people are sharing knowledge on a wide variety of things? And yet you choose to call languages ugly, hard to read, and shame people for sharing knowledge because it isn't in your beloved programming language. And you call me elitist?

It's not shaming to say a language is ugly. Languages - like art - are open to subjectivity. You're arguing for objectivity towards Lisp/ClojureScript - so yes, you are acting in an elitist way. Should I encourage children to learn eye for an eye, simply because that's a way of thinking? Or would I be better to give them tools that make their world easier to comprehend and think for themselves?

It's funny you brought up math - because children learn math at very early ages, and they progressively grow to understand more complicated math as they are able. The entire time the child is learning math, though. Math is the most basic instruction set that is used to count sides of a shape - all the way up to complicated thought experiments involving quantum mechanics. It is a semantic language that not only doesn't require a manual, it doesn't even require a theological conversation to apprehend it. So much so that when we attempt to communicate with life outside of our solar system, we use math to communicate with them. Why do scientists chose math over latin, or Russian? Because chosing a nationalist language would be dumb. Why would I chose to teach a language that obfuscates readability? Seems dumb.

So because you believe that one group of people can't learn a particular language, nobody should be allowed to post using that language on the internet? I both have been taught racket and taught racket myself in schools, and at no point was coding presented as 'only for elites.'

I'm not sure why you hate lisp-like languages so much and can't accept that it's actually more comfortable for some people. I'm sorry if you were hit with one too many "lisp is for a more civilized age" people.

Coding is for everyone, no?

(? ((have you written) lisp before))

My comment got prohibited while the parent was flagged, but the example code seemed pretty understandable to me and I've never written a line of lisp code in my life (the closest I've come is cutting and pasting lines into an emacs config file). While Lisp has claimed ownership of all the parentheses that Python has eschewed, it's a more than reasonably readable language and predictable in its syntax.

This argument doesn't hold anymore now that there are threading macros.

(-> ((have you written) lisp before) ?)

(has? (previous-experience 'lisp))

Does: reset!(caret-location nil)

Make more sense to you?

Maybe you would like OO style?

(-> caret-location (reset! nil))

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