Discussion
Okay. Linux tolerators. I have a question.
Which of these two hypothetical syntaxes for a configuration file do you like better?
If you like one or the other better, do you like it *so* much better you'd say something like "I would find this categorically easier to read and work with". Or do you just like it better.
neither sparks joy but I will accept a Parenthesis Avalanche if it means I don't have to deal with syntactic whitespace and people whose only contribution to human society is "linting" tools that break the build pipeline over aesthetic whitespace complaints
@mcc Is the right image whitespace-based a la Python/haml? Or are the expressions delimited a different way?
@misty The right image is a whitespace-based s-expression syntax. (It also happens to coincidentally be the syntax of "the LISP I wrote last year".)
@mcc Makes sense! Personally I like the right one. When I'm editing something quick like a config file, I find that positioning parens is a little bit of extra thought than I'm looking for vs writing a more "full" program
@mcc the second, but for all its faults, I‘d prefer just yaml over either, for the devil you know type reasons
What if I made Guix for people think avoiding AI is fractionally more important than avoiding proprietary drivers, think GPL2 was a better license than GPL3, and/or hate parenthesis
Okay so based on one response I got, here is a third possible syntax for the same thing (these are all different ways of writing S-expressions). You may or may not be able to tell the difference between this and the second one, but there's an important difference (it involves pythony colons rather than whitespace by itself)
Any of these would be clearer with syntax highlighting, but apparently to implement syntax highlighting these days you have to write Go code and submit a PR to a lime
@mcc Probably more people know Python than any other formal syntax at this point in history? Not a pythonista myself but would still probably vote for this one.
@mcc I'd say all of them, and S-expressions in general, suffer from the problem of being a highly optimised language, but meant to be used by humans, who exclusively communicate in highly redundant languages.
It is PAINFUL to read and understand, because you are not allowed to stop paying attention for even the tiniest moment.
@mcc the sex pees are better. Indentation leads to misery in configuration files
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