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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

Typically commas and semicolons don't have to be matched with open-commas and open-semicolons and you won't see several of them together like ';;;;'. There is a lot less ambiguity over what is ending than something like this example (worst case) from TFA:

> (lambda _ (for-each make-file-writable (find-files "." ".*")))))))

',' and ';' are far more convenient too, the sit right next to m and l, parenthesis require finger stretching and the shift key.

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> Typically commas and semicolons don't have to be matched with open-commas and open-semicolons

This is a problem that is non-existent when you use common tooling to write Lisp, like ParEdit or Smartparens. Since nobody would write C++ in Microsoft Word, nobody writes a lot of Lisp code without auto-matching parentheses tools.

I'm using paredit, so I'm never typing out closing parentheses. I'm just slurping and barfing s-expressions all over the place. I don't see parentheses but syntax units that my editor ensures remain correct.

(I can understand the frustration if I was forced not to use Emacs, which has s-expression navigation commands, and if the use of paredit were forbidden.)

It's the great advantage of Lisp syntax that it supports structural editing in a complete and unified way, and paredit enables the leap from editing code by manipulating plain lines of characters to directly editing code as hierarchical structure.

What C and its descendents have instead is numerous repetitions of '\s}\n' to end

if-then-elseif-else switch-case for while until functions methods classes

and good luck figuring out which matches which when there's more than a screen between the beginning and the end of a block

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