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Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

"Deep Learning in Clojure with Fewer Parentheses than Keras and Python"

Love it! :D What better way to define a neural network in code than an S-expression?

I am not sure if I am that enthusiastic. The problem with Lisp is not a number of parenthesis but where they are and what is their role. In c-like languages parenthesis help parser compiler but they also help humans to read the code. In case of Lisp they are just for the sake of the parser. Let's look on the code:

Python:

  model = Sequential()
  model.add(Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3, 3),
                 activation='relu',
                 input_shape=(28, 28, 1)))

Clojure:

  (defonce net-bp
    (network (desc [128 1 28 28] :float :nchw)

Which one is more readable? looking on the Clojure code I see 128 1 28 28 thrown on me, without digging in the documentation I have no idea what's happening.

> Which one is more readable?

Both are equally readable to me.

Now, granted 128 1 28 28 can be difficult to understand without documentation but that is not due to Lisp's fully parenthesized prefix notation. The Clojure code would also look equally readable if it had used keyword arguments.

Are you sure you are not confounding familiarity with readability? With Lisp, after a while, the parentheses become invisible to the programmer.

But that's due to named parameters vs. positioning, not parenthesis; I can mirror your argument with:

Python:

  model = Sequential()
  model.add(Conv2D(32, (3, 3),'relu', (28, 28, 1)))

Clojure:

  (defonce net-bp
    (network (desc :input-shape [128 1 28 28]
                   :type :float
                   :something :nchw)

It all depends on how desc is defined.

Disclaimer: no idea what those functions mean, I only made syntactic changes.

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