Comment by DonaldPShimoda

4 days ago

The tooling around S-expression syntaxes is almost necessarily better than others because it's so straightforward, eg, structure-based editing operations. The "problem" with IDE integration for such languages is generally the (lack of) availability of static information, especially due to Racket's expressive arbitrarily-many-phased macro system, but that's a separate axis of language design.

That said, the parent comment explicitly pointed out Rhombus as an alternative to an S-expression syntax within that same community, so maybe you could look into that suggestion instead of being pithy about topics in which you are less well informed.

I suspect the GP might not like Rhombus because it uses indentation (like Python) for code blocks instead of braces (which isn't actually Algol-like; IIRC, Algol mostly used parentheses). In that case, even Pyret wouldn't work for them.

Personally, I'm still (25 years into programming) undecided: does syntax not matter at all, matter only a bit, or is one of a language's most important characteristics? It's incredibly hard to say, at least for me.