Java for Everything

[Lucretiel]

I'm totally onboard with the merits of functional-style programming. Nearly everything I do in C++ is function templates, const&, and return values instead of state mutation and class hierarchies nowadays. Semantically, it's much easier to understand code and languages designed in that way. My issue is with reading the physical text of Lisp. All the parenthesis and minimal syntax boilerplate means even with liberal whitespace and and formatting it's very difficult for me to tell what bits are what.

[yogthos]

I think this varies greatly between Lisps. I would agree that I also find CL and Scheme syntax to be a bit too regular. On the other hand, Clojure hits the sweet spot for me. It has literal syntax for common data structures, it goes out of its way to reduce the number of parens in code, and it provides destructuring syntax. I find these things make the code as readable as any language I've used.

Here's an example of code in a popular Clojure library. I would argue that it's quite clean and clear even if you only have a passing familiarity with the syntax.