I hope you don't mind me adding my two cents to the discussion. I believe that people who use Lisp tend to see the advantage of its syntax for meta-programming.
As Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele wrote in "The Evolution of Lisp", Algol-style syntax makes programs look less like the data structures used to represent them. In a culture where the ability to manipulate representations of programs is a central paradigm, a notation that distances the appearance of a program from the appearance of its representation as data is not likely to be warmly received (and this was, and is, one of the principal objections to the inclusion of loop in Common Lisp). On the other hand, precisely because Lisp makes it easy to play with program representations, it is always easy for the novice to experiment with alternative notations. Therefore we expect future generations of Lisp programmers to continue to reinvent Algol-style syntax for Lisp, over and over and over again, and we are equally confident that they will continue, after an initial period of infatuation, to reject it. (Perhaps this process should be regarded as a rite of passage for Lisp hackers.) Personally, I had a lot of objections when SRFI-105 and SRFI-110 were ratified. I thought that it's going to be more harmful than helpful, as it would only increase the entropy of the Lisp code base. I still don't think that syntax is the problem. I think that we should be able to switch between different representations of "the same thing", but if we want this to be possible, we need to surpass the idea of syntax (or the idea that programs need to be text that is parsed). Maybe the direction similar to where "I think we should be heading" is somewhere between Mathematica notebooks and Smalltalk's object environments. I wrote a bit more about it here (I intended to present that during Racketfest in March, but unfortunately I ran out of time) https://www.quora.com/Can-you-create-a-better-syntax-of-Lisp/answer/Panicz-Godek -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/2080dcd1-a36b-4cd5-93c7-e692ea877509%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
