What makes people see Lisp-like languages and think to themselves "yep, this is how I want my code to look like" is beyond me
If you have a knee-jerk reaction to everything that looks different, you'll lose out on lots of fun stuff. You should give lisp a try, I'm sure you won't regret it.
Unless you carefully study the reactions of nonprogrammers, you are biased.
To a nonprogramming person, this is quite probably "different"
(p->arr[x].pfn(y)>>SHIFT)&MASKThe magic of S-Expr is like drug-addiction... someday you wakeup and realise... damnn I can't go without S-Expr in my daily-driver-languages :/
Yes I always tell ppl, sure you don't need to like LISP but as a serious CS professional, AT LEAST give it a real HONEST go! Then if you still don't like it, cool, move on !
There is an active and lively and long-lived LISP-Like community even today, there is a high probability there is something there.
YMMV :)
For example, why not name "car" function as "first", "head" or "beginning"? Why not name "cdr" as "rest", "tail", "end" or "back"?
ANSI Common Lisp has first and rest as synonyms of car and cdr. Books from the middle 1980s on the then emerging Common Lisp already cover this.
It's like you're griping about an issue that was closed before CVS existed, let alone git.
car and cdr still exist because of backward compatibility and because they are good names for when cons cell structure is just arbitrary structure and not a list. The car is not always the first item of a list, and cdr is not always the continuation of a list. These words are deeply entrenched in the Lisp culture. The words have no confusing associations with anything else but the parts of a cons cell. I've not come across any "car" or "cdr" usage in computing anywhere, except Lisp-inspired jokes like in the "Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol". In the telecomm industry, CDR stands for "call detail record", but that's removed from programming language and data structuring.
Knuth defined some binary-cell tree structures in TAOCP. He used the words alink and blink (as in A link, B link). Those words are not bad.
It's good if the parts of a flexible data structure that programs use for representing all kinds of things have names that don't have any confusing associations. When you see those names, you know they are just literally about that structure, and you can see from how those words are used what the shape of the structure is.
If anything, other languages are different for the sake of being different.
Btw, Clojure makes those exact changes you mention (first instead of car etc.)
roughly 25 years after Common Lisp introduced first,..,tenth, and rest
Every now and then I try to check out a Lisp project and this is my reaction the moment I see the code: https://giphy.com/gifs/seinfeld-bye-jerry-106PwpLIIXJnXi
Don't look at the parens and don't stop at the superficial look :]
And, the non-Lisp languages tend to have more rat droppings => , ; . etc.
f is a function which takes two arguments, adds them, and returns the result.
Clojure: (def my-var ["hello" 123 (f 10 20)]) -> my-var: ["hello" 123 30]
([""()]) -> 8 noisy characters
JavaScript: const my_var = ["hello", 123, f(10, 20)]; -> myVar: ["hello", 123, 30]
=["",,(,)]; -> 11 noisy characters
Obviously this difference becomes more pronounced with longer argument lists or array element counts.
However I agree with you on some level. Lisp code can easily be written in a way that’s hard to read. Specifically because of nesting expression way more often than is comfortable for me to read. I much rather prefer let bindings and threading so most of the code reads from left to right.
Just know that almost no one STARTS off by liking Lisp-Syntax, but oh boy does it grow on you.
And you get the bonus of being able to construct or parse code from within code, since the structure is so uniform and flat.
Regarding Python, I've always disliked its functional whitespace and OO inclination. Given its popularity, though, I'm clearly a minority!
TL;DR — to each their own.
Then suddenly after a month or so you suddenly realise wow, this is actually nice and useful and now all other non S-Exp feels jukky.
You get to that point NOT because you are now simply enduring/accepting that it looks ugly but it really after a while becomes pretty !
It's like picking up smoking, no one likes the first or two cigarettes at first, it taste like sht, yet if you keep doing it becomes lovely. *
PS. Don't smoke kids !
Alan Perlis