this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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...from people who seem to refuse to install paredit or coloring plugins for either? ps lisp syntax ftw, it's a feature!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I don't get why people hate semantic whitespace. The whitespace would be there anyway, and if anything it's easier to read as long as you avoid 15 nested if statements, and you're not using a dynamically typed abomination like python.

S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn't know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).

In all honesty, I can understand the reason people love s-expressions, but to me they're just unreadable at a glance.

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

Semantic whitespace is awful because whitespace (something that you can't actually see) has meaning in how the program runs. Braces { } for scopes gives you the ability to easily tell at a glance where a scope ends. Whitespace doesn't allow for that. Especially, especially when you can accidentally exit a scope (two new lines in a row with Python) and it's not actually an error (Pythons global scope). Yeah formatters and linters make this less of an issue but it sucks... Languages with legible symbols for scoping are significantly easier to reason about, see end symbols in Lua.

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