Comment by christophilus
2 days ago
I wish more languages would adopt Clojure’s approach to optional delimiters in collections.
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It’s just a nicer thing to view and type in my experience.
Regarding syntax soup, I think Odin is probably syntactically the cleanest of the lower level languages I’ve played with.
oh, yeah. that looks good. i always hated using ", " delimiter for lists and the amount of typos it always takes to make clean(well, not with Go fmt).
Odin seems interesting but for me it has two deal-breakers: first one use the use of ^ for pointer de/reference. Not that it does not make sense, it's just that it is not an easy key to get to on my keyboard layout and i will not be changing that. The & and * are well known characters for this purpose and, at least for me, easily accessible on the keyboard. Second issue is the need to download many gigabytes of visual studio nonsense just so i am able to compile a program. Coming from Go, this is just a non-starter. Thirdly, and this is more about the type of work i do than the language, there are/were no db drivers, no http/s stack and other things i would need for my daily work. Other than that, Odin is interesting. Though I am not sure how I would fare without OOP after so many years with inheritance OOP and encapsulated OOP.
It's a Lisp thing, obviously, but also there's a benefit to explicit delimiters - it makes it possible to have an expression as an element without wrapping that in its own brackets, as S-exprs require.