"""There are old things that are much better than their newer counterparts. Take S-expressions for instance, or Lisp, or Tex."""
1) There are today tons of BETTER Lisp-like languages than 60's Lisp.
2) What are the "newer counterparts" that S-expressions are better from? Here's a few propositions for something better than old style S-expressions: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/
And from a pragmatic standpoint, one can even argue that (more modern) C is even better than Lisp/S-expressions, because it has enabled orders of magnitude more used and useful software, include the whole of Unix/Windows/OS X/Linux, etc.
3) Putting TeX on this list makes it a vicious circle. You cannot explain why TeX has not been surpassed by something better by invoking TeX being better that anything newer.
This is not a thread for lisp/sexp discussions, but the better sexp miss the important point that:
define some(x y z)
code goes here
should not be any different for the compiler, especially the way humans understand what the compiler does, than a simple list/array:
(1 2 3 4)
This way, you can mess with code the same way you do it with normal data structures, replace parts, add things etc.
The way they are writing it, "define" looks like a keyword, just like "if" and "for" is, in most of the languages, instead of a function, just like everything else in lisp is.
1) There are today tons of BETTER Lisp-like languages than 60's Lisp.
2) What are the "newer counterparts" that S-expressions are better from? Here's a few propositions for something better than old style S-expressions: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/
And from a pragmatic standpoint, one can even argue that (more modern) C is even better than Lisp/S-expressions, because it has enabled orders of magnitude more used and useful software, include the whole of Unix/Windows/OS X/Linux, etc.
3) Putting TeX on this list makes it a vicious circle. You cannot explain why TeX has not been surpassed by something better by invoking TeX being better that anything newer.