Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbp | Hacker News Reader

> Later he talks about the ugliness of Lisp syntax, especially CL, but Scheme and Clojure are supposed to be better. On what basis? I may admit scheme is elegant, but calling clojure's syntax an improvement over CL is a pretty long jump.

Having syntax for 4 different data structures instead of just one would be one of my main reasons. Also, the syntax of a lisp-1 is cleaner.

View on HN

While I like scheme and clojure, why do you think lisp-1's are cleaner? Perhaps it was just my order of learning, but I rather liked the different namespaces CL provided, primarily as it eliminated name collisions between variables and functions. If list were an appropriate variable name, I could call a thing list versus the abbreviated form lst in scheme (that's a trivial example, but I recall more name collisions back when I was using scheme and CL as hobby languages).

I guess, syntax-wise, the main difference is no longer needing funcall, which was a headache when I was learning CL.

Because what if there where 6 equally important datastructures, or 100? The only datastructure you need to express when you are programming is the AST, in my humble opinion, and lists serve it well, visual trees might be interesting.

The Lisp-2 design has a very good practical reason: 50% of a common type of mistake are impossible to make. More namespaces don't hurt a language, while less namespaces usually do (Javascript for instance).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com