Lisp Syntax Debate

While Rust is great, one of the things I love with LISP (Clojure) is once you spend 3 min learning the syntax you know it or can guess the syntax in 99% of cases. No need to look up how to do something complicated, just look at the order of arguments.

What makes people see Lisp-like languages and think to themselves "yep, this is how I want my code to look like" is beyond me

Can someone help me understand the benefits of a Lisp or Lisp-like language? To me they feel overly verbose and make it more difficult to read code. What is the point of all the parentheses? I get that other languages have some weird syntax, but Lisp seems masochistic. Is there some actual advantage or purpose to it?

OK I'll have a go, but others will be able to do a better job than me!Yes, you might like lisp and I definitely think it's worth trying. You often hear people saying "lisp has no syntax" and that's one of the main things about lisp. I think a good first step is to understand what people mean by that. You know the way a compiler or interpreter, after tokenizing and parsing, transforms code into an intermediate data structure representation called an "abstract synt

I'm really sorry to hear my article has wasted your time. You are right, it was rambling. I'm kind of like that and it just surfaces, no matter how hard I try to behave!Basically, rthomas6 explained it better. But may you allow me to rephrase myself, as a complement as much as an excuse?There are 3 points.The first says that Lisp is simple because once you know how to write function calls in classic language (like C, Java, Javascript...), you have all you need to write Lisp co

What makes people see non-Lisp-like languages and think to themselves "yep, this is how I want my code to look like" is beyond me

The LISP + functional mind-set is not easy to get used to when you come from non-functional (specially bad is OOP), verbose, syntactically complex programming languages (e.g. C, C++, Java, C#...). I think you should focus on learning to think the functional way. Then LISPs will reveal all their power through simplicity. That's how it worked with me at least ;)

As a person who started learning Lisp after years and years of using mostly mainstream languages, I have to at least partially disagree. I will say this, however: Lisp is, at first, difficult to read for many people. But I think it is mainly difficult to read for people who are used to reading programs written in languages with Algol-like syntax (C, C++, Java, Perl, etc). If you've been writing programs for 5, 10, or 15 or more years mostly in languages that all have that common ancestry, it

As a non lisp programmer, it is hard for me to automatically see what is going on in a lisp program because of mismatched " ' " and a lot of parenthesis. I believe this is one of his points. When I was learning python, or ruby, for that matter ( I use both! ) I never felt like I had no idea what was going on in the code even before I learned the languages.

I find Lisp to be at least as readable as anything else, and much more readable than C++. The syntax is different from other languages but that is not a problem once you are comfortable with Lisp syntax. Lisp syntax and semantics almost always mean that there is less need to work around annoying and brittle aspects of the language, and so the code you are reading tends to be more relevant.