this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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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.
Just for anyone thinking you are serious; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression I love how S-expression existed.
And for anybody thinking of implementing M-expressions, look at Wolfram Mathematica, which is the only popular M-expression-oriented language. It turns out that high-level graph-rewriting semantics are difficult to make efficient! (If you want to try, you might also want to look at GHC or other efficient graph-rewriters to see what the state of the art is like outside Planet Wolfram.)