I thought the same thing for a long time, I found s-expressions very elegant. Then I discovered lambda-calculus, with its scary syntax but based on a process I could understand, text-rewriting. So I had the idea to explore the lambda-calculus using s-expressions and patiently rebuilt booleans, pairs, lists, recursion and beyond a real complete Turing language, for instance:
No need for cons, car, cdr and other historical names. We can rebuild everything from scratch, from abstractions and applications. No need for Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp and other Clojure, even if they remain excellent examples. So in my opinion the Maxwell equations of computation are to be seen more in the lambda-calculus than in LISP and its dialects. We just need to make the syntax a little more human.
- http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks
- http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=lambdacode5
No need for cons, car, cdr and other historical names. We can rebuild everything from scratch, from abstractions and applications. No need for Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp and other Clojure, even if they remain excellent examples. So in my opinion the Maxwell equations of computation are to be seen more in the lambda-calculus than in LISP and its dialects. We just need to make the syntax a little more human.