We need to talk about parentheses
Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes. There are pretty simple languages and really complex ones. But what unites most of these languages is the syntax. There are many languages so-called C-like, as they share many syntax ideas with C language, which includes consistent indentation, grouping, scoping, and infix notation. And many other syntax aspects usually are common in a majority of languages.
But there’s one language, that is different from the others. It has a long story and research behind it. This language, developed in the late 1950s, and evolved since, still being alive up to our days. I’m talking about Lisp, of course.
That’s gonna be today’s topic - why parentheses, how to deal with those, what features we can gain from those, and what tools we’ve come up with over the years of Lisp hacking.
The thing is, Lisp is notoriously known for its parentheses, as for many this is its main feature they will defend at all costs. However, for some reason, novice computer scientists fear these parentheses. This produces a lot of various memes, like this one1:
