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What makes Lisp difficult to read?
(paultm.nl)
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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It's honestly more familiarity than anything else, and it's mostly that Polish notation isn't how people learn to read math in school. If Polish notation was how math was notated then lisp would be the easy one to pick up. Similar to how natural languages have the parts of speech in different places in sentences.
Did you read the article? This has nothing to do with familiarity.
Yes, but they're wrong. All else equal some of vthat stuff might would matter as optimization, though
"They're wrong, that's the way it is". Great argument. Very convincing.
Their first comment provided reasoning. This "because that's the way it is" framing is unfair.
The article is 90% about brackets and Polish notation is nearly a footnote. How is the reasoning that "it's mostly familiarity" sound? When I call
doSomething(param, arg, whatever)moving over the left bracket a word isn't going to confuse people because of "familiarity".Some things are obvious, and you can write a whole essay without the base assertion being correct ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Same as you can say something seemingly obvious but still wrong 🤷
Dunno why you're trying to start a flame war, but I'll be on my way. Have a nice day!
well, if familiarity can be ruled out, surely there is a quadruply-blind study then? how many participants were there? you need to test teaching lisp first then c and on another group the other way around. you also need to have groups of untrained people and show lisp first, then c, another group for the other way around.