logoalt Hacker News

embedding-shapelast Tuesday at 11:14 AM1 replyview on HN

This is such a undervalued benefit, once you've learned s-expressions, you can basically learn a bunch of languages without having to learn completely new syntax. It'll be slightly different, with different idioms and names, but a hell of a lot easier than doing the same across every "It's like C but 50% of the syntax is different actually" language out there, which is most of them.


Replies

juriplast Tuesday at 11:53 AM

Is the syntax really the stumbling block for most languages? Would Rust's lifetimes or Swift's isolation rules be easier if they used more parens? Are the scoping rule differences between Emacs Lisp and Scheme easier to comprehend because the syntax is similar?

show 5 replies