rationalskepticism.org

VazScep wrote:

mizvekov wrote:That premise is worded quite strongly, but I can't really disagree with a weaker version of it.
It's quite difficult to match all those pesky parentheses to their closing ones

I just never really bought that. For starters, no serious Lisp user would dream of Lisp hacking without a facility to highlight matching parentheses. (go to Options->Paren Match Highlighting in Emacs). And with decent syntax highlighting and appropriate indentation, I never found readability an issue in Lisp. That's not cheating: every language cares about appropriate indentation and syntax highlighting, and I always have paren-match highlighting turned on when hacking in ML or Haskell.

In fact, when I'm tallying my shopping lists or budgeting, I tend to use Lisp so that I can write in this style:

Code: Select all

(+ (* 2 37) ; beans
    400      ;detergent
    127      ; meat
    1000    ; extremely expensive cuisine that helps make this look less of a student's shopping list
)

...snip