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Comment by rubyron | Hacker News Reader

> All I can say is that I have never been so insulted (even by the likes of my moronic sister (who seems to delight in making me uncomfortable (and she is so good at it, knowing just how to push my buttons (which I think is a skill that all siblings possess to some extent (which I believe proves some sort of genetic link (despite the fact that I really enjoyed genetics in school (relating on so many levels to Gregor Mendel and his peas (but of course peas make me gag, since my throat swells when I eat them)))))))) as I was by someone suggesting that I have ADD.

Brilliant.

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I tend to write with an excessive amount of parenthesis with context/tangents. I used to joke it was due to Lisp/Scheme being one of my first languages. Took me a few years to realize the ADD connection.

I do this to get it out, then I rewrite it to take all the parentheticals out.

Those parentheticals can be rewritten with commas, which sent me on an exploratory tangent trying to see if one could use commas instead of parens in Lisp.

you also have dashes for parenthesis.

That's interesting. What did you find?

Like a sibling commenter said, commas are not enough to be unambiguous. Ambiguity is fine in prose, because we can resolve it from context, but computers need something clear and well structured.

But several layers of parentheticals delimited by commas are ambiguous to parse in the general case.

Me too - I try to avoid parentheticals in polished writing because they're usually there to avoid having to decide if something is really important. If it's not important, take it out (or if it's a very technical detail that can be skipped on first reading, maybe put it in a footnote (uhoh, I'm doing it)).

So the venn diagram of ADD(ADHD is the preferred term these day) folks and Lisp(Scheme if you're fancy) programmers is a circle?

Linus overuses parentheses. Or rather, parenthetical remarks. It's interesting.

It still needs Yoda speak to qualify as lisp.

Is use of deeply nested parentheticals really a sign of ADD? Certainly, nesting the parentheticals deep enough to overflow your mental context stack will lead to losing the plot. However, if both you and your intended listener have the capacity to keep all of the contexts in memory, it wouldn't seem to cause problems.

Hehe honestly this is what often happens when I do journaling with my stream of consciousness text editor: https://enso.sonnet.io

Hard to keep track of the parentheses though as the text disappears after 3-4 lines.

I was also experimenting briefly with a graph-based text editor where o could keep my tangents in check but still have some overall structure.

I bet they speak with a lisp.

That sentence seems enough like some bastardized version of shakespeare[0] and Lisp that I bet you could get it to compile in some dialects.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...

Looks like the author has been writing Scheme code on the weekends..

All the parentheses close at the same point, though.

Lest anyone get triggered by the subject matter into actually trying to find this, it's from https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019. (We changed the URL (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018429).)

Thank you!

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