Comment by addicted
14 days ago
No, it doesn’t.
What has happened in reality is that C became really popular and then all the people designing languages they wanted to be popular, rather than to be experimental, or to push boundaries, etc obviously chose a syntax which was familiar with most programmers, ie a syntax like C’s.
Further, one can disprove that the syntax is particularly important by simply pointing to Python which became immensely popular despite a lack of curly braces and even worse with significant white space simply because colleges and bootcamps decided it would be a good language to teach programming to beginners.
Arguably python and c are much more similar than any of them compared to a lisp.
I would argue the important part are the blocks in the former two, which sort of gets lost in the homogeny of lisps. Whether a block is marked with curly braces or indents doesn’t matter much - they being dissimilar to a regular expression does. Of course well-formatted lisp code tries to indent as well, but still there is a lot of visual noise there making it harder to visually inspect the code, I would guess.
Of course familiarity with a given way is significantly more important. We pretty much learnt the non-intuitive writing of math, to Chinese people their writing system is the intuitive one, etc.