Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

Clojure and Clojure-like Lisps (Janet, Hylang) use fewer parenthesis by replacing them with other pairs of characters ([], {}) for certain block structures, which is exactly what other non-Lisps do. The only difference is that Clojure still puts the opening character at the beginning of the structure instead of in the middle, like how non-Lisp languages usually do.

View on HN

I actually find Clojure's syntax more confusing with all the punctuation they threw at it. Compare that, for example, with Scheme. I like the idea of keeping Lisps "pure" if that makes sense. In Lisp, the first element of a list is the operator. Okay, then how is Clojure a Lisp when it has vectors like this [1 2 3]? Unless [ is a macro that expands [1 2 3] to some real Lisp-y expression under the hood.

> I actually find Clojure's syntax more confusing with all the punctuation they threw at it.

Could you give some examples? Or "all the punctuation" you are referring just to []?

I'm not the same person you asked, but I find Clojure to be as easy to read as Scheme, but harder to write, since I need to remember what punctuation to use where.

I don't know, it makes sense to use different data structures for different purposes. (), [], {} are all different data structures (lists, vectors and maps) that are useful in different situations, so makes sense to have shorthands for them.

Maybe. What bothers me about this idea is that it doesn't scale: As soon as you need a fourth bracket type you're hosed, because there are no more on the keyboard.

With Common Lisp, you can define [ and { if you want to, but it's more common to use a reader macro character in front of an opening paren or a function name after it if you want different data structures. Those approaches scale.

It's a literal vector in the sense that '(1 2 3) is a literal list. Though unlike the quoted list it evaluates to itself, like a string or an int does.

To be fair, there are more differences; where Clojure requires parentheses, non-Lisps often don't need them at all.

E.g. in Python indentation carries meaning. Ruby has "do/end"; but also it's possible to skip parentheses in some function calls; there are pipes too. Haskell - whatever haskell does, sometimes also pipes. There are more examples.

That being said, for me clojure parentheses were always more of a help than an inconvenience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com