What makes Lisp difficult to read?
3 hours ago
- Lisp's prefix notation places parentheses farther apart, making visual matching harder due to limited focal vision.
- Formatting practices in Lisp (e.g., closing parentheses stacked) do not aid parentheses tracking, unlike C-style languages where delimiters are closer.
- Prefix notation results in more left-nesting, increasing demands on mental stack (working memory).
- Lisp lacks or discourages features (like method chaining or threading macros) that align evaluation order with reading order, causing reverse-reading cognitive overhead.