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I agree in general that sexps provide the best editing experience currently, but that's just a matter of tooling, it's not an inherent property of sexps vs infix or whitespace-dependent syntax.

Check out [0], a structured editing mode for Haskell, a whitespace-sensitive language.

Incidentally, while I have no problem with Lisps (I've used Clojure for about a year), I do prefer infix notation, precisely because it's not homogeneous.

[0] https://github.com/chrisdone/structured-haskell-mode




You likely prefer infix because it is familiar. It is amazing how much familiarity influences preference.

And yes, tooling can help. For either case. I'm leaning towards simpler tooling, which means me towards s-exps. Mainly because a lot of time has passed, and evidence is structured editing just doesn't take off in other languages. And I don't see requiring tooling as an improvement.


Yes, familiarity influences preference, and infix is familiar.

Almost all adults who develop software have had 12 to 20 years of practice using infix notation as a standard part of mathematics, and it's also a standard part of practically all programming languages except Lisp and Forth. It's possible to notate calculations without infix (obviously!), but that doesn't mean that people WANT to do it. It's absurd to fight against the worldwide standard of infix notation for standard math operations like "+".

For most people, {2 * {3 + 4}} is easier to understand than (* 2 (+ 3 4)). If a Lisp reader simply treats {...} as a list, where the operator is the even positions, then you have the best of both worlds: standard infix notation combined with Lisp's ability to do quasiquoting, macros, etc.




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