🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Lisp Syntax Boring

Wait. What? Is Lisp syntax boring? My immediate response is, “Of course it is.” That’s its strength. Lisp doesn’t have much syntax so unlike other languages you can immediately start using the language without having to worry about learning a bunch of syntax rules. Everybody who’s learned a non-Lisp language knows that a significant part of learning the language is imbibing the syntax. An advantage of Lisp is that you can mostly avoid that step.

You’d think that would be obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with Lisp but apparently not. Aggravating_Date_315 over at the Emacs subreddit asks if anyone else finds Lisp syntax boring. Not in the sense that I do but that there’s not enough structure and sugar. He wants superfluous keywords and structure because the simplicity of Emacs is boring. He loves how easy it is to edit Elisp in Emacs but finds Lisp joyless and sterile.

The commenters were not particularly supportive although a few did offer some suggestions for dealing with the matter. My favorite was from intergalactic_llama who says, “People looking to create problems for them selves always fascinate me.”

I don’t understand how anyone could think that making something more complicated would make it more natural and fun. To me, the joy of programming is writing code to solve a problem and I have no interest in making that code more convoluted than it needs to be.

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