RE: on adding a function call to a s-exp

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> electric-pair-mode offers a tiny fraction of the features of paredit.
> The later takes some time to learn, but in my experience the effort
> pays off if you work with lispy languages.

FWIW (he ducks), I work with a Lispy language, Elisp ;-).  And I
don't use any "structured-editing" feature (crutch / ball-&-chain)
such as `paredit' or `electric-pair-mode'.  I'm non-electric all
the way.

I use only (1) the usual keys to indent, move over & around sexps,
transpose sexps, etc.; (2) `show-paren-mode', `blink-matching-paren';
and (3) (yes!) sometimes a mouse (double-click sexp select,
copy-kill-yank).

I've never had any problem with unbalanced parentheses, brackets,
braces, angle-brackets, double-quotes, etc.  Really _not_ a big
deal, IMHO.

To me, having an editor automatically insert a closing delimiter
each time I type an opening delimiter is a bother, not an aid.

Back in the 1980s (!) I briefly tried such slurp-barfing
"structured-editing" gimmicks.  Abandoned them quickly.  I
suppose one could become accustomed/habituated to using them,
and then see them as essential, but no one I knew ever did.

These features originated outside Emacs, BTW, in experimental
editors that were extremely rigid, based on the brilliant idea
that editing operations should always leave text "valid" in some
sense.  These were not editors designed & developed by users!

It was thought that users should be prevented/protected from
writing code that is not syntactically well formed.  That was
supposed to improve software reliability and programming
productivity.

No.  Users should instead have aids to (1) tell whether code is
well formed and (2) make it well formed (in different ways).

(Just one experience and one opinion.)