Hacker News

LISPy things you can do in 64K bytes of core (2019)

56 points by andsoitis 2 days ago | 12 comments

> Note that programs were usually typed on as few lines as possible, because they had to be punched to punched cards or typed in at a teletype which echoed its input on paper.

I suspect this is the real reason behind "cram all the closing parentheses together on the same line" rule.

The only rationale I've seen online is in Taylor Campbell's style guide:

> Absolutely do not place closing brackets on their own lines.

> ...

> Rationale: The parentheses grow lonely if their closing brackets are all kept separated and segregated.

Yeah, right.

Anybody know anything about how this rule came to be?

a96 2 hours ago

Heh, I remember that and personally answering no when he complained about my paren formatting. I miss that channel.

weknowbetter 7 hours ago

This drives me nuts. I love LISP but refuse to pretend writing `)))))))` is reasonable.

corroclaro 3 minutes ago

My editor (emacs) shows how I close the scopes and it is easy enough. I'm not sure why writing

would be so much better.

uncletaco 7 hours ago

Why are you writing ')))))' instead of your closing parenthesis being autogenerated. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

bitwize 7 minutes ago

The 2026 version is: Why are you writing Lisp instead of your code being autogenerated. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

greenbit 6 hours ago

))))))) isn't so bad, but )))))))) is just getting ridiculous. You have to draw the line somewhere

isr 6 hours ago

picolisp has an interesting solution to this. A single ']' will close all open )'s for that block of code

packetlost 4 hours ago

That has to be a nightmare for parsers lol

ashkankiani 2 hours ago

not really. it's just pop all of the stack and return to depth 0. you can still detect imbalanced parens, but i'm not sure how it affects the provenance question of where a missing one would point out in errors.

andsoitis 7 hours ago

[flagged]

hujun236 6 hours ago

[flagged]

matt_daemon 6 hours ago

This is somewhat confusing as there is a fairly well known toy Lisp interpreter called Lispy written by Peter Norvig

https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html

tomhow 9 hours ago

Previously...

LISPy things you can do in 64K bytes of core (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490099 - July 2025 (4 comments)