> You could say "paragraphs and punctuation only guide your eyes, but to know what the text says you have to read it, there's no other way around" - ancient greek was written without word spaces, it barely introduces any ambiguity.
I'm not sure to understand. But I fully endorsed your paragraph statement up to but not beyond the remark that a parenthesis is a punctuation. I was not suggesting we don't need some kind of punctuation or blank lines in code. I was pointing out Lisp dialects are proof you can basically code with just three signs of punctuations: newlines, left parenthesis and right parenthesis.
Are we also clear on the fact every programmer knows how to program in Lisp, even if they didn't even program in it? It's just like function calls, except for the whole language. Really. There's no need to write Lisp code a lot. It is enough to take a few steps back, consider the whole picture and see it for what it is.
Lisp is chainable action perimeters. And that's very easy because it is just like function calls in C, Java, Javascript or many other, more mainstream languages. If you know one of them - and I bet that's the case - then congrats, you can program in Lisp! Whether you choose to do so or not, you're the judge of course and either way is fine with me. But don't say reading or understanding Lisp is hard because for that you only have to learn the vocabulary, as is the case for every programming language.
Anyway, thank you very much for the pointer to SRFI 49! I have searched a bit about indenting Lisp code but never found something that detailed.
I'm sorry for the absurdly fine-grain of my stats. It's just that I have my own Lisp code parser for that and it includes inner comments and blank lines. So it's really that precise but I was silly to recopy these numbers without thinking about the issue.
My point was to say they are consistently that low. And for some languages, it's clearly not the case. But from the few codes of Python I have read and given your own stats, it feels like Python is very consistent. And in my eyes that's definitely a very good thing.
> "Ultimately "no, this language is more awesomer" gets nowhere, I think. You're clearly passionate about Lisp and think it is the best."
I just read again my comment and it can so be read like that... I should have been more careful. I'm truly sorry to have almost versed into a flame debate.
But to read my comment in the direction that Lisp is more awesome or simply the best is to amplify too much my claim which was relative to a precise issue: the needed amount of lines of code against the complexity of the problem. I really said nothing more than Lisp has an edge there and I think the examples give an idea of complex problems: parsing code to get a precise line count or to identify dependencies or to even execute automatically step-by-step the code, these are surely complex tasks. At least it is for me and I can't imagine coding it in other languages than Lisp. Because of their very syntax.