As a parentheses hater my personal hell would be having to audit and refactor a lisp codebase
Having worked with Clojure for over a decade now, I find it far easier to refactor than most other languages I’ve touched.
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
I love how much of a kamikaze this is: “yeah that thing LISP does terribly? Non-LISP languages do it too!”
Except LISP doesn’t do it terribly, and in my experience there are a lot less parens and other separators than in most languages.
Ok… but the comic doesn’t say that…
The comic doesn’t say anything about Lisp doing it terribly either. It’s saying that people who complain about parens are dealing with far worse in mainstream languages.
It quite literally says “LISP is ugly and confusing with those endless parentheses” and then fails to refute that claim
It’s making fun of people who say that lisp is ugly and confusing. There’s nothing to refute there either since the claim is nonsensical as anybody who’s actually used lisp knows.
The real interesting debate is between
((f) 1)
andf()(1)
.I personally find
((f) 1)
easier to read. You just go inside out, evaluatef
, then pass1
as the argument to the output off
. There’s no ambiguity regarding order of evaluation there.