Comment by tpfour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpfour | Hacker News Reader

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You never spent much time with it and the parens are a major impediment? If you cannot overcome the "parens" (non) issue, I suppose the language is not for you. It really is not an issue, _at all_.

I don't say this to be demeaning! I would say there are far more chances you really enjoy the language than not. Give it a try and stop worrying about the parenthesis and start thinking in terms of an AST.

    (let ((x 0)) (+ x 1))

If you want Python that's fine but there is definitely no problem with parens in Lisp/Scheme :)

Ha, just thinking aloud! More of my own psychological barrier than a knock on Lisp. I do like it quite a lot, it's just completely alien compared to a life of experience with C-like languages.

I found its alien nature to be kind of helpful in learning Clojure, actually. The paren position change really does melt away quickly, and in the meantime it was a good reminder that I was “not allowed” to do procedural code or mutate variables; I had to use a different mindset. Most people who check out Clojure have been coding for 10+ years, so you’re in good company as far as ingrained habits go.

As others have said, the best way to check it out is to get a REPL running in a decent IDE and play with the language. There’s something quite intuitive in its workflow: knowing that you want to do something, though you’re not quite sure what it is yet, and typing a single ( gives you all the power and space you need to figure it out no matter how deep inside a code block you are.

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