@lupyuen damn you you posted the wrong link!

@freemo @lupyuen Have you guys seen this one? https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/

@johnabs

My god that looks like an awful language... dont get me wrong maybe its actually fine.. but seriously lisp syntax, the uggliest and hardest to read syntax of the common choices outt here, to replace latex... i thought hte intent was to be as easy to use as markdown but as powerful as latex...

No for me one look at the example code for this tool sent me running.. I love functional languages like haskell but lisp-like formats are just offensive to my delicate eyes :)

@lupyuen

@freemo @lupyuen I personally like the lisp syntax because it enables structural editing and navigation, and the lack of \command{args} syntax which just becomes (command args). But I understand it's an acquired taste 😂

Also, this one doesn't *need* lisp syntax, it can also use emacs outline syntax which is close to org mode.

@johnabs

I mean, that is a fine argument for the need for a good formal syntax.. but it hardly needs to be of the lisp flavor.

@lupyuen

@freemo @lupyuen Well right, but I see the parens as a feature, not a bug, even though they're ugly:

"Low/simple syntax" is good for people to pick up the language and makes macro writing much simpler.

Navigating by AST branches makes rapidly locating certain pieces of your code by muscle memory/touch typing much faster.

They eliminate the need for closing tags (e.g. \end{environment}, <\head>), or the (IMO) awful syntactically meaningful whitespacing of python among other languages, so you can format it however you want.

They allow for autobalancing of parens, and automatically confer the use of "tree-sitter" esque parsers without needing to understand the compilation process to produce a concrete syntax tree (which can change when languages evolve).

As an extension of the previous point, they allow for semantically meaningful diffs as compared to character/line based diffs which dramatically improves the readability of code modifications as compared to the current standard.

For this particular case, it's a fully featured language using Guile scheme, not just a markup language, so you can extend it as much as you want, call other software, do computational experiments on a cluster and pull the data back, create and directly insert plots, and who knows what else, all from within this one tool.

Etc.

To conclude, I think lisp is aesthetically ugly, but one of the most (if not the most) practical language when it comes to building tooling to make development easier, automate tasks with macros, and to facilitate code sharing (at least with people who understand s-exp syntax), and since there are so many flavors, you can always pick your favorite 😁

Thank your for coming to my TED Talk 😂

@akater @freemo @lupyuen Well, it's ugly because of the ((((((((( ))))))))) that inevitably crops up.

Of course, there are autoformatters that help with this, (and things like rainbow parens...unless you're coloblind 😅 ).

Also, there's of course the issue of the sexp being read inside out, rather than left to right (hence my love of pipes in languages like julia, but that are sorely lacking in lisps).

So yeah, they're ugly and unergonomic in the most basic ways (IMO), but in the much more complicated ways they become nearly frictionless.