>> I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color”
I think you make a great point, a point that once someone has gotten used to lisp, is harder to fully appreciate. I’m at the stage now in my lisp journey that i didn’t find those hard to read but it wasn’t that long ago that i felt almost nerd sniped by this weird language. I think it’s worth pointing out that in a more advanced example, I’d still have been comfortable because of the repl - I could navigate between each sub expression with a keystroke and I can send each to the repl with a keystroke and see what they do. Lisp really makes it easy to do this kind of bottom-up assembly - both when you’re writing and when you’re understanding someone else’s code.
A corollary to that, and which was key to me falling in love with lisps, is that the signal-to-noise ratio is off the charts. Whatever you want to implement, probably doesn’t require a lot of code. Wordle in 189 lines is pretty decent. There’s just less to fit in your head and what’s there tends to be solving the problem at hand, not boiler plate.
Just don't mention Electric Clojure, because that might cause some head explosions. (Fully reactive multi-tier programs where an entire web UI is 60 lines of code and implements infinite scroll with search and dynamic viewport resizing.)
If you know Clojure, the code presented in the example seems fairly straightforward. Parentheses demarcate the syntax tree; and the last expression in any tree is the result carried forward.
I think you make a great point, a point that once someone has gotten used to lisp, is harder to fully appreciate. I’m at the stage now in my lisp journey that i didn’t find those hard to read but it wasn’t that long ago that i felt almost nerd sniped by this weird language. I think it’s worth pointing out that in a more advanced example, I’d still have been comfortable because of the repl - I could navigate between each sub expression with a keystroke and I can send each to the repl with a keystroke and see what they do. Lisp really makes it easy to do this kind of bottom-up assembly - both when you’re writing and when you’re understanding someone else’s code.
A corollary to that, and which was key to me falling in love with lisps, is that the signal-to-noise ratio is off the charts. Whatever you want to implement, probably doesn’t require a lot of code. Wordle in 189 lines is pretty decent. There’s just less to fit in your head and what’s there tends to be solving the problem at hand, not boiler plate.