> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!

Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on.

> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.

I have pretty mixed feelings at this point. I don’t mind it for normal programming, but when I do numerical programming (physics models, etc.) you often get extremely long and verbose expressions that are IMO difficult to parse compared to the math-like infix operator notation used in other languages.

Actually not all those are ancient customs.

In the first description of the language LISP, from March 1959 (AIM-008), John McCarthy had used the names "first" and "rest", instead of what later will be called "CAR" and "CDR".

The names of "CAR" and "CDR" appear to have come from the students who worked at the practical implementation of the LISP interpreter on an IBM 704, and unfortunately we have remained stuck with them, like also with other features that were intended only for a temporary use, until being replaced in the "final version" (which was abandoned).

I'm starting to prefer the s expression syntax when dealing with tree structures like json.

I wonder if we were raised on tree based algebra if math would be easier to do, or harder.

Like, solve for x.

   (= (+ (* 2 x) 3) 11)
   (= (* 2 x) (- 11 3))
   (= (* 2 x) 8)
   (= x (/ 8 2))
   (= x 4)

    (= (+ (pow x 2)
          (pow y 2))
       (pow r 2))