I imagine the tricky part for someone unfamiliar with Lisp would be that there's no syntactic clue that a particular thing is a macro or special form that's going to treat its arguments differently from a function call. Someone who knows Scheme may have never seen anything like CLOS, but would see from context that defmethod must not be a function.

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yea, and CLOS is pretty weird, with putting methods outside the class definition.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't even need to define a class to define methods. I'm sure that's surprising to people coming from today's popular language, but the original comment was about syntax.

Whether Lisp syntax is ugly is a matter of taste, but it's objectively not unreadable.

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Where you can define a method is syntax

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

In most languages, I would agree with that. In Lisp, I think I might not. If Common Lisp didn't come with CLOS, you could implement it as a library, and that is not true of the object systems of the vast majority of languages.