Comment by skybrian
4 years ago
Modern editors have good support for many languages that don't use S-expressions. Have you tried out VS Code?
I think for this effort to succeed, they only need to do as well with editor support as other mainstream languages.
No offense, but editing mainstream language's code is a pain compared to working with S-expressions. If they manage to get merely to that level of code editing convenience, they can keep their new syntax, I'm gonna stick to S-expressions.
I often see people using VS Code editing code. To me it often looks painful and I have the urge to do the code editing myself in Emacs with all my key bindings and good S-expression support. I have seen people being even much faster than me as well, with extra commands they define for moving S-expressions around and paredit and so on. Maybe VS Code can somehow be configured to offer the same comfort in code editing. I have not seen it done so far.
I think it's like you said. We will just have to wait and see. You are not the only one that has voiced their apprehension about moving away from S-expressions. One thing I really appreciate about the Racket Team is their commitment to reducing the barrier to entry into the language. Whether it's the Documentation, A built in IDE for the language, package manager, binary downloads directly from the website, or moving away from mailings lists and Google Groups to Discourse. You could even say that moving on top of Chez Scheme to reduce the amount of C code to maintain is also reducing the barrier. It's easier to get into Racket in 2022 then it has been at any point in time. Especially if you aren't familiar with Lisps like I was a few years ago.
I think this is another move in that direction. If it fails, then we will have a strong data point into why Lisps are just better for some things. But the team is dedicated to not just doing things the old way and we've gotten so much good from that mode of thinking that I'm excited to follow this process whether it fails or not.