The more mental energy you expend parsing a programming language's syntax, the less you have available for parsing a program's logic—or creating it yourself. This is why core fluency is so important; it frees up your own compute cycles for more important work.

It's also another reason why "vibe coding" is so toxic. It robs you of the opportunity to gain that fluency.

@mttaggart Also, write-only syntax choices that e.g. require counting different kinds of brackets with your fingers...

@buherator Actually now I'm super curious how often models would screw up complicated Lisp for this reason.

@mttaggart @buherator .promise().unwrap().exists?.to_enum()#valid.err_fail().isBoolean()

@buherator @mttaggart For almost all practical purposes, Lisp is an indentation based language.

The secret is that you need to use a text editor that supports Lisp syntax. Automatic indentation handling really isn't optional.

The only truly write-only language I've personally dealt with is the classic unix-ish style regular expressions. Trying to do anything complicated in that is going to go sideways quickly.

On the other hand, I've known for >25 years you could develop a sane, more verbose, usable syntax for regular expressions. Perl 6 did some of this, IIRC.