Lisp in Small Pieces of Clojure, part 3
Slightly unrelated, but to those who have never tried Lisp because of the parenthesis (like me until recently), here&#x27;s my take:<p>I&#x27;ve recently started hacking with Elisp, and I really like it. Parenthesis are obviously pretty awkward at first. But now I wouldn&#x27;t leave them for anything else. As it turns out, the brackets make it easy for your <i>editor to understand the semantics of your code</i>, to a whole new level. So your editor is now actively helping you navigate and edit your code. You go from expressions to expressions, add one after an other, transpose them and their parameters, absorb other expressions, insert them etc. It&#x27;s true magic. I thinks that&#x27;s why some don&#x27;t like the fact that CL-loop is not &quot;lispy&quot; enough: you lose your editor&#x27;s help inside a CL loop.<p>So the parents are actually really cool: you can basically tell your editor to move code around and insert &#x2F; delete it instead of doing it yourself. With these tools (smart parents and paredit on emacs), your parenthesis are always matched ! And because it&#x27;s lisp, you&#x27;re actually forced to use these tools because it&#x27;s a nightmare otherwise (which makes it kinda hard to learn at first), so you actually do learn them. I haven&#x27;t used smartparents with other languages, but I hear it works pretty well.<p>Finally, it seems that lisp dialects compile to almost anything. Which means that you can use a lisp editor and get all its benefits even when working in clojure on the JVM or clojurescript on the browser etc. And once you&#x27;re good at lisp, you can pretty much make Emacs do anything.<p>Conclusion: Lisp Is Pretty, give it a try when you get a chance ;)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Fuco1&#x2F;smartparens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Fuco1&#x2F;smartparens</a><p>EDIT: fixed some sentences so they make sense...