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Comment by jdale27 | Hacker News Reader

It's 2013, and the top comment on a story about Lisp (on HN, a site written in Lisp) is complaining about syntax? Seriously, how much time did you actually spend learning/using Lisp before giving up because it had a "massive indentation problem"?

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Surely expressing personal issues with Lisp's syntax is valid, especially if a possible solution is offered. If you see at least some of the larger codebases written in Lisp, it is natural to be overwhelmed by the level of indentation, which will cause the code to wrap under many editor setups.

I've heard people complain about parentheses, but indentation isn't usually the issue. I challenge you: I looked at your personal website, and you seem to claim experience in Java and C. Show me a large codebase in Lisp and a large codebase in Java or C where the Lisp codebase is dramatically less readable than the Java or C codebase due to indentation.

You seem very upset. Calm down. I just had an idea that it might be fun to represent lisp code in a treemap. Or rather a zoomable treemap like this:

  http://bost.ocks.org/mike/treemap/

Perhaps like these?

http://foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/

I very much like the mwe-color-box.el example. Is something like that possible for backquoting? The quoting-levels would be much easier to see with nested background shading. I'll have to try it at home.

Not upset, just tired of ignorant programmers who get off on complaining, and inventing solutions to imaginary problems (bad syntax? ooh, clever visualization!) rather than actually writing code. By the way, you didn't answer the question -- how much Lisp code have you written, "javajosh"?

Could you lay off the personal attacks?

>it might be fun to represent lisp code in a treemap

Wow, yeah, that's a really interesting idea. Is there just one (good) way to map a codebase? Many?

It seems like a bad idea at first glance, since the map shows, at any level, more things with less context-per-thing when compared to straight text. It seems totally natural to use it for profiling. Refactoring would be a lot more grokable if it could all be visualized at once. But how would it work for scanning/editing & digging through documentation?

"Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures"

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