On Thursday 17 December 2009 01:11:18 am Josh Cheek wrote:
> > If you really think that, I think you'll find Lisp much easier and more
> > intuitive.
> 
> I've actually just bought the Prag Prog  book for Clojure :)

And I finished the Gigamonkeys book on Common Lisp:

http://gigamonkeys.com/book

Actually, syntax wasn't my problem with Lisp -- macros make it even better, 
and if I really had a problem, it'd be trivial to write an indentation-
sensitive language that compiled to s-expressions.

While Ruby just looks better, my biggest problem with Lisp was that Common 
Lisp, at least, has accumulated decades of cruft. It wasn't the syntax, it was 
naming conventions for the functions -- things I find in Ruby, like 
String#chop vs String#chop!, don't always seem to exist. Plus, too many things 
seem to be named at an uneasy balance between wanting names to be short enough 
to type (I'm guessing from the days of teletypes and such), and wanting them 
to not be "hieroglyphs" (generally preferring something like "add" to +, 
though that's a bad idea since + exists.)

Maybe I should look at Clojure, though...

> > has_many :comments, :through => :posts
> 
> Yes, this is more readable, and not especially complex. I am not opposed to
> all exceptional situations, but we do have quite a few as is, and I'd
>  prefer not to superfluously add more, just because we can.

In this case, it's not "just because we can", but because I think it would 
look noticeably better. In particular, Ruby's greatest strength is good-
looking DSLs. However, Haml looks better to me than any Ruby-based builder 
DSL, and the biggest reason is all those 'end' statements.

It just bothers me that, as a Rubyist, I would prefer a DSL targeted at Ruby, 
but which isn't actually Ruby syntax.

But based on the response so far, it doesn't look like enough people (at least 
on ruby-talk) care enough about this. I suspect most of them are still too 
fatigued from the "beating a dead horse" thread.