[racket] Sweet expressions; or making it easier to introduce Racket to me and my coworkers :-)

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Wed Jul 20 16:21:26 EDT 2011

Not to discourage you guys, but just a factoid to keep in mind... 
'statistically', 31.891% of Lisp programmers have experimented with a 
non-parentheses syntax for Lisp (usually to try to make the language 
more appealing to other people), and 0.001% of those experiments have 
been used in any lasting way.

Also, some related work to look at in Racket: "Honu" and "P4P".

One way that Honu is useful is we can point to it and say, "If you don't 
like parentheses syntax, you can use Honu instead and still get all the 
goodness of Racket!"  But in practice, I think pretty much everyone 
quickly starts using paren syntax, just like they quickly stop trying to 
put each closing paren on its own line.  There is no invisible 
dominatrix making them do this, but they decide that the conventional 
way is not so onerous after all, or perhaps even that the conventional 
way makes good enough sense.  Eventually, they might come to even love 
the parentheses.

If you want to push for a non-paren syntax that people actually use, 
then by all means do so, but I think you'll have to push very hard.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/


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