I don't usually reply to this sort of thread, but I'll toss in two
cents worth anyway. Speaking as a PHP programmer wading his way
through the beginning-to-intermediate stages of Clojure, I have to say
that I do not like the proposed "sugar." If I wanted to write PHP in
Clojure, I'd just write PHP, because I already know that. What Clojure
has that PHP lacks is an elegant simplicity to its syntax, which is a
direct result of its consistent treatment of parentheses. To introduce
new forms would unnecessarily complicate things and obscure this
fundamental consistency. If I see
(foo "thing")
bar("other thing")
it looks to me like there should be some significant difference
between foo and bar, and how they are used. Syntactic sugar ought to
simplify difficult things, not complicate things that are already
simple. If we did have such sugar, I would think we ought to hide it
from beginners, so as to avoid confusing them unnecessarily. But then
what would be the point of having it?
Parens just aren't a big deal. Would HTML be easier to learn if we
wrote "div<>" instead of "<div>"? My kids can learn to write web
pages; I can't imagine an experienced programmer would really be all
that put off by the order of the first two symbols. If anything, it's
the nesting that's the real problem, and that's not really solved by
swapping the first "(" and "foo".
Sorry for being so negative--I do appreciate your good intentions, and
you do have a worthwhile goal. Also, it's just my personal opinion,
which doesn't count for much, so just take it for what it's worth.
m
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