Agreed, parentheses make manipulating code blocks a breeze. Also, I just realized I had confused Crystal with Julia in my initial rant. Made a fool of myself (again). I played with Julia when it reached 1.0 and liked the no-parens yet functional approach. It felt like a lisp in disguise, a bit like Python, but much cleaner. What I initially meant to say, apologies to Mr. King, is that a parent-less Racket2 would remind me of Julia. On the surface, at least! Crystal does have macros but that’s all it has in common with Julia and Racket.
I did read the Honu paper and I agree: if there’s a way to transition, that’d be a very elegant one. Parentheses absolutely are a barrier of entry, and this would go a long way to make Racket less intimidating to non-lisp users. But is it worth the effort? Like the first HN comment said, ‘best way to break a good lisp is removing the parentheses’. I don’t think it’s that black&white, but there’s certainly some truth there. Dex > On Jul 23, 2019, at 12:17 AM, Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltst...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I just want to give one thought as input to this discussion and will admit, > that I did not read every (but some) of the posts above. > > When I write code in Racket or Scheme, I mostly like the parentheses, as they > make writing the code easy. I can very easily select a block and move it > around, without introducing any syntax errors. I can also quickly see what > the scope of something is, what other expression it is in. I don't get these > things from languages without this many parentheses or without s-expression > syntax. I need my parentheses as markers for my cursor to quickly jump > around. It is the most pleasant code typing experience I've ever had. So when > considering to move away from parentheses, please also consider the burden > that those parentheses take away from the person writing the code. When I > edit for example Python code, things are not clear when moving around code. > This is worse in Python than in other languages, which at least have curly > braces (but usually some other annoying deficiencies). If there was a move > away from this many parentheses (read markers for my cursor), it would have > to provide equal editability, for it to be attractive to me. A design based > on indentation or something like that is not going to cut it for me. And what > else would be used as start and end markers for expressions? Wouldn't that in > essence just be another form of "parentheses", just looking different? How > would any editor know, where an expression starts and ends for easy selection > and moving around, if there were no such markers? So far I got no idea how > that could be done without introducing loads of new constraints about how you > can nest expressions into the language. So it beats me. Maybe my imagination > in this area is still somewhat limited. > > Just my 2c. > -- > 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/bf0b5dd1-8802-4c78-af7a-4231ae30ad60%40googlegroups.com. -- 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/6994654B-255A-4A0A-AF63-2702EFD67B75%40gmail.com.
