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#clojure-austin
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2016-10-16
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herbm10:10:50

Are there really that many who mind the parens? Everyone who teaches intros in lisp-languages seems to worry about this but do we really find people getting stuck over that? It's really just about convincing the brain to see the FUNCTION/operator* is up front in every set of parens. That's actually not true in most languages, even the part about there BEING a function inside the parens. Every language has brackets, even if it is noise "words".

herbm10:10:01

BTW, I have working REPLs to ClojureScript/Om/ReactNative apps running on Android just the last couple of days. iOS should be easier but need to set up an OSX VM to show that.

arielvalentin14:10:11

The parens seem jarring at first. During the workshop i mostly struggle I had though was with NightCode trying to be helpful. When I switched to emacs, things got better however there where times where I would miss a parens and spent a minute or two matching them up. I can't image that being any different for the first few months until I started learning tricks for auto balancing or training myself to finish it. When I am working with Java for example I let IntelliJ do most of the annoying work for me. I am pretty sure I would forget semi colons or miss brackets here and there. And generics... forget about it

norman14:10:47

I mostly rejected LISP in college. Two of my biggest complaints were parenthesis wrangling and problems understanding mutable cons cells.

norman14:10:51

Paredit solved the parenthesis problem and Clojure solved the mutability problem

norman14:10:01

@arielvalentin the only trick is to use paredit. Never manually wrangle parens. Trust me.

norman14:10:36

Once you use a structural editor like that, the parenthesis become almost invisible. I have a hard time editing code in languages with irregular syntax now.

arielvalentin15:10:52

@norman: emacs minor-mode Paredit?

arielvalentin15:10:09

Yeah, I'm with you on parens wrangling

clojuregeek17:10:47

Paredit for the win

norman18:10:11

@arielvalentin we have enough new people it might be worth doing a paredit tutorial. or maybe better yet a review of all the structured editing techniques.

norman18:10:32

Including the parinfer that the clojure environment we were using used

arielvalentin20:10:08

That would be interesting to me.