Readable Lisp S-expressions Project (2013)
There&#x27;ve been so many attempts at removing the parentheses from Lisp, to make it look more like C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Java, or (more recently) Python, or other.<p>FWIW, there&#x27;ve been many attempts in Scheme (and Racket), including one by the core Racket developers (Honu [1]), but they&#x27;ve never taken off.  New people decide to use parentheses.<p>There&#x27;s a phenomenon with Lisps, in which, speaking loosely, half the people who first see a Lisp think the parentheses are a problem, and immediately start to propose &quot;solutions&quot; for &quot;acceptance&quot;.  But then they try the Lisp with the parentheses, in an editor with at least simple indenting support, and they very quickly get used to it, and maybe even value it.  (A small percentage of them will still put each close-paren on its own line, for a substantially longer period, but it seems even most of them will quickly learn to snuggle close-parens and possibly to use fancier editor commands for movement and editing based on expressions rather than lines.)<p>Programmers seem more malleable than we might think.  I&#x27;m not as sure about those mathematicians or scientists who try to minimize their time learning programming, or who are necessarily working with hairy expressions in LaTeX and don&#x27;t want to have to keep translating.  For possible use of those people, there are a number of efforts to permit expressions to be in more familiar infix order [2], and to support familiar TeX math notation in the Racket-based typesetting&#x2F;documentation system [3].  (And if you don&#x27;t like those, Racket will let programmers plug in your own reader or `#lang` to make another attempt at this atop Scheme.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;honu&#x2F;Examples.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;honu&#x2F;Examples.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;guide&#x2F;hash-reader.html#(part._readtable)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;guide&#x2F;hash-reader.html#(part._r...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;scribble-math&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;scribble-math&#x2F;index.html</a>