this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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I get dizzy looking at C-like languages, they just feel incredibly hard to follow compared to an S-expression.

Everything this just so verbose and there's so much negative space between the lines. To be fair, this course is making us program using Java so maybe it has to do more with that.

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[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Apologies for nitpicking, but did you mean that all statements are expressions in Lisp? If there were no statements, surely it would be impossible to actually make things that do anything other than calculate some results, wouldn't it?

The Interpreter produces the side effects required when the program starts (it does the syscalls, state changes, etc) Haskell is a pure functional programming language that is not a lisp that has no statements but it can also make web applications, data crunching tools, and games.

Lisp can be used in an imperative context with mutability, so it's not locked into one style of programming or the other.

This seems to contradict the formatting used for examples that I see on the Guile Hoot page, as well as your prior factorial example. Wouldn't that mean that that example should have been formatted as something like the following?

https://lisp-lang.org/style-guide/

Special forms like "if" and "defun" are highlighted in your editor. There also exists editor plugins that will let you edit lisp through s-expressions (being able to swap two s expressions rather than deleting one and then putting it in the desired place)

This is not the only style guide, each dialect has their own style guide.

The unreadable soup that lisp is may seem to be are macros (which requiring understanding the macro first before using). But macros without context are difficult in any language, not just lisp.

Going back to SXML, there is no special sauce that makes SXML what it is. It simply is a quoted representation of XML tags. There is no API or anything (outside of evaluating SXML to convert it into another representation)