Introduction to Clojure (2013) (creativeapplications.net)

The project was written in a Literate Programming style. These turned out to be an obstacle for contributions, so there is an ongoing effort to migrate the code out of that. You can find the latest version on this branch: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/tree/feature/no-org

(And code with 50 nested levels of parens is Bad Code, just like too much nesting in a C-like language)

When using Emacs, the editor can ensure the parenthesis always match. It can also show you which parenthesis match, and if you insist on allowing having non-matching parenthesis, it can show you exactly where they don't match. So even in that case you don't have to worry about it because the editor will point it out to you.

Parenthesis are probably the most trivial and unimportant thing about Lisp, and people get way too hung up about them.

What's far more important is the power that Lisp gives you, how easy it is to program what you want in it, and how elegant and easy to understand the solutions you come up with are.

Instead of having some kind of spaghetti code monstrosity full of ridiculous boilerplate as you would in other languages, you could have a nice and simple solution in Lisp. Isn't that worth allowing some extra parenthesis in to your code?

  func Foo(s string) string {
    println("hello")
  }

  (defn foo [s]
    (println s))

There are some cases where you do get a few more parens, e.g. with mathematical operators, but overall it's not that different, it's almost completely user perception.

Yes. There comes a moment in which you suddenly stop minding parentheses. For me it was when I started reading SICP and doing its exercises on paper. After writing a couple Lisp expressions by hand, something clicked in my brain, and since then I don't need to count parentheses anymore.

I strongly suspect following the Lisp style of indentation and placing parens (closing parens go together, instead of one per line like in Algol-derived languages) is vital to achieving that.

The style in lisp is to keep all the closing paren on the same line: ))))

But in java or C you’ll sometimes see a function that ends like: } } } }

(Hmm my newlines didn’t cone thru on those braces)

Not exactly apples to apples comparison, but it illustrates how you can start to unsee those parens.

The first is a quote bathed in absurdity from an actual LISP manual:

> setf can also be used with any of these functions to change an existing component of x, but setf will not make new components. So, for example, the car of a cons can be assigned with setf of car, but the car of nil cannot be assigned with setf of car. Similarly, the car of the car of a cons whose car is a cons can be assigned with setf of caar, but neither nilnor a cons whose car is nil can be assigned with setf of caar.

I think this sums up the aesthetic horror that LISP is to me. Pretty sure it was written by Dr. Seuss.

But a far more important factor exists: There are no decent paying jobs for LISP programmers outside of the browser which is a personal hell to me. Besides Clojure, I know of no real foothold in the professional world. I have no doubt there are outliers, but, that's just not the kind of thing to bet on.

So no, not bothered by the parentheses. Bothered by lack of real words with real meaning and lack of motivation to tolerate the ugliness.

Every time I try this, like twice a year, I get annoyed while setting up a development environment that supports the particular Lisp (usually Clojure), its syntax and the REPL. Last time I tried it was Spacemacs that didn't work as announced, on both Linux and macOS.

I am a Vi user and I would prefer to use that instead of learning a new environment such as Emacs. I want to set this up and have it work as frictionless as possible because learning a new programming language and its ecosystem is already enough work. However the Vim plugins (e.g. fireplace) also didn't "just work".