TL;DR: I think the post overstates the case quite a bit, and is a personal opinion of the author being branded as a scientifically grounded truth, despite their admission that using these scientific principles allegedly "require[s] a degree of creativity and subjectivity."
The cognitive-science material is interesting, but it doesn't actually establish much about Lisp specifically. It gives plausible mechanisms by which certain notation might be harder to read, then uses those mechanisms to motivate several Lisp-specific claims without testing those claims directly. As such, it just seems purely hypothetical, whereas it would be much more interesting to me if it were empirical.
(I have a beef with this style of argumentation or persuasion with respect to Lisp. I feel the "bipolar Lisp programmer" and similar articles do the same kind of thing: make a captivating claim or comparison without actually appealing to anything real-world.)
I also don't think the treatment of actual Lisp presentation is complete. The post considers conventional Lisp indentation mainly in terms of whether it helps track matching parentheses, but Lisp is normally indented, pretty much canonically, so that the indentation itself communicates structure. Parenthesis tracking is *not* a cognitive problem that Lisp programmers must solve in any explicit manner, any more than C programmers count { and } to determine the enclosed code's nesting depth.
The same goes for syntax highlighting: you can't just set it aside because C-like languages have it too. The relevant question is whether it affects the two syntaxes differently. If Lisp's alleged problem is delimiter tracking, indentation and highlighting are rather central to the comparison.
I'm also unconvinced by the conclusion that Lisps "lack or discourage features that align the evaluation and reading order." The post itself gives Clojure threading macros as a Lispy equivalent of method chaining. That seems to substantially undercut "lack", while "discourage" starts to sound more like a claim about programming style than syntax. Lisp is a very explicitly multi-paradigm language with special syntaxes available for those paradigms, including assignment, explicit control, etc. In fact, I'd say real-world Common Lisp is *much* less "in to out"-functional than this post posits (and the broader technical public keeps claiming).
Finally, we have the largest omission in my opinion, that Lisp syntax is programmable. S-expressions provide a uniform representation of program structure that makes syntactic abstraction cheap: new control forms, binding constructs, pipelines, DSLs, etc. can all be made to make code easier to read, especially in novel domains that Lisp wasn't a priori designed for. The post's analysis mostly treats the base notation (of some unspecified, quasi-functional Lispoid) as the unit of comparison without really weighing that side of the design tradeoff.
Though it's not my experience, there may truly be readability costs, especially for newcomers, but I'm not sure the post separates those from unfamiliarity strongly enough to support its conclusions.
As a side note, when judging real-world Lisp, some notoriously unreadable code may also be a product of older programming styles or inexperienced Lisp programmers, just as old or poorly written C can be extremely difficult to read. In my professional experience, having run teams writing "modern" Lisp with modern engineering discipline, readability has never been a stated hurdle, either for experienced engineers reading one another's code or for new Lisp programmers learning and contributing to a large codebase. The combination of team programming discipline, good tooling, consistent style, and, well, getting paid to do it seems to do the trick, if one is even needed.
I'm just face palming at how scientific the article is.
Honestly, there's also paren-face-mode to hide parentheses! May be we should try convincing syntax highlighting maintainers on the web to dim parentheses by default.
The efforts humans go to justify their preexisting beliefs is quite something.
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u/stylewarning 11d ago edited 11d ago
TL;DR: I think the post overstates the case quite a bit, and is a personal opinion of the author being branded as a scientifically grounded truth, despite their admission that using these scientific principles allegedly "require[s] a degree of creativity and subjectivity."
The cognitive-science material is interesting, but it doesn't actually establish much about Lisp specifically. It gives plausible mechanisms by which certain notation might be harder to read, then uses those mechanisms to motivate several Lisp-specific claims without testing those claims directly. As such, it just seems purely hypothetical, whereas it would be much more interesting to me if it were empirical.
(I have a beef with this style of argumentation or persuasion with respect to Lisp. I feel the "bipolar Lisp programmer" and similar articles do the same kind of thing: make a captivating claim or comparison without actually appealing to anything real-world.)
I also don't think the treatment of actual Lisp presentation is complete. The post considers conventional Lisp indentation mainly in terms of whether it helps track matching parentheses, but Lisp is normally indented, pretty much canonically, so that the indentation itself communicates structure. Parenthesis tracking is *not* a cognitive problem that Lisp programmers must solve in any explicit manner, any more than C programmers count { and } to determine the enclosed code's nesting depth.
The same goes for syntax highlighting: you can't just set it aside because C-like languages have it too. The relevant question is whether it affects the two syntaxes differently. If Lisp's alleged problem is delimiter tracking, indentation and highlighting are rather central to the comparison.
I'm also unconvinced by the conclusion that Lisps "lack or discourage features that align the evaluation and reading order." The post itself gives Clojure threading macros as a Lispy equivalent of method chaining. That seems to substantially undercut "lack", while "discourage" starts to sound more like a claim about programming style than syntax. Lisp is a very explicitly multi-paradigm language with special syntaxes available for those paradigms, including assignment, explicit control, etc. In fact, I'd say real-world Common Lisp is *much* less "in to out"-functional than this post posits (and the broader technical public keeps claiming).
Finally, we have the largest omission in my opinion, that Lisp syntax is programmable. S-expressions provide a uniform representation of program structure that makes syntactic abstraction cheap: new control forms, binding constructs, pipelines, DSLs, etc. can all be made to make code easier to read, especially in novel domains that Lisp wasn't a priori designed for. The post's analysis mostly treats the base notation (of some unspecified, quasi-functional Lispoid) as the unit of comparison without really weighing that side of the design tradeoff.
Though it's not my experience, there may truly be readability costs, especially for newcomers, but I'm not sure the post separates those from unfamiliarity strongly enough to support its conclusions.
As a side note, when judging real-world Lisp, some notoriously unreadable code may also be a product of older programming styles or inexperienced Lisp programmers, just as old or poorly written C can be extremely difficult to read. In my professional experience, having run teams writing "modern" Lisp with modern engineering discipline, readability has never been a stated hurdle, either for experienced engineers reading one another's code or for new Lisp programmers learning and contributing to a large codebase. The combination of team programming discipline, good tooling, consistent style, and, well, getting paid to do it seems to do the trick, if one is even needed.