in the world there should only be one debate and one summary about programming languages, and everybody should read that as a starting point before they enter t

in the world there should only be one debate and one summary about programming languages, and everybody should read that as a starting point before they enter the fray. for example, I would say what i was taught, that lisp is lists made out of cons cells, which contain references to either other lists/cons cells or to atoms. lisp doesn't "have" parentheses any more than lisp has the rest of the ASCII table, but parentheses were chosen as a convenient way to write list structure down in ascii form because parentheses nest in exactly the way lists do and lists are the important thing. then there never needs to be another discussion of parentheses and how you feel about them except in a sub-discussion if anybody has any bright ideas about alternative ways to convert list structure to ascii on paper. you disliking parentheses does not mean you dislike lisp; it just means you don't understand lisp, like for instance you think lisp has something to do with ascii. similar ideas apply to C, wherein the braces and semicolons do not matter, what matters is datatypes that correspond to von neumann architectures including especially pointers, and where binary representation is easily exposed (with a syntax that does not matter but for the record is &, |, ~, ^, <<, or >>. if you hate those choices for operator syntax you could easily convert your own C to use parenthetical lists of CamelCase names of LeftAddRight or whatever floats your boat instead of a + sign), just keep in the front of your mind how data is represented internally and how it's mapped to the syntax you like, and whatever list structure you choose to order the lines of code) Ur-ness is not interesting, just as the city of Ur was no doubt a lot less interesting than the city of Rome. Study Algol only to learn about call-by-name, then forget it. I could go on, but, like the ripples from a gold coin thrown in the bay, the effect will soon dissipate as if I had never written anything at all.