Any advantage in LISPs having simpler grammars than Python?

[Paul Rubin]

Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> writes:
> Experienced Lisp programmers use indentation to visually parse the
> program structure, just like Python programmers do for Python.
> Experienced Lisp programmers learn to not see the parentheses when
> they don't need to.


The OP might find this interesting: http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html

> When I did a lot of Lisp programming, I often felt that it would be
> kind of nice to have a version of Lisp that would infer many of the
> parentheses from indentation, so that you could elide most of them.
> But then again, the parentheses are very easy for an experienced Lisp
> programmer to ignore, so such a change would have been a very hard
> sell.

"Super parens" were present in a few old Lisp dialects but these days
I think most Lisp programmers use editors that balance regular parens
automatically, so that when you type a closing paren, the editor
highlights the matching open paren or the cursor briefly visits it.
RMS first implemented this feature in the 1970's or so, and says that
within weeks of starting to use it, he lost the ability to count
parentheses manually.  He inferred that since he lost the ability so
fast, counting parentheses must have been taking up a considerable
amount of his mental resources, which were now freed up for other
things.

With automatic paren balancing, the parentheses in Lisp aren't really
bothersome.  Lisp itself (to me at least) has gotten to feel clunky
and old-fashioned over the years.  Of course, a new incarnation could
appear.

www.lemonodor.com is a good blog where Lisp geeks hang out.  Lots of
interesting things (not just Lisp related) get posted there.