21–30 of 62 posts
If anyone misses Geocities or myspace, look at this site in IE. I'm not sure what exactly the point of (seemingly) intentionally making your blog site readable in FF and outrageously hard to read in IE is...
I think the point is clearly, "Fuck you, Internet Explorer." It's a sentiment many on the internet share. I've got a few places where I simply block IE with stylesheets myself.
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I think the point is clearly, "Fuck you, Internet Explorer." It's a sentiment many on the internet share. I've got a few places where I simply block IE with stylesheets myself.
You're not a company man, aren't you? :)
For the longest time I've heard that "Lisp is awesome", but no reasons why and when I've asked why, the answer is usually, "you have to try it to see it" This article is a pretty nice down to earth point by point explanation why list is so cool. My question is: is that it ? lambdas, data is code, dynamic programing.. I mean those features are cool, but could someone post some more clear examples of why lisp is awesom…
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html
"""What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"""
This isn't why Lisp is awesome. This is why Lisp was awesome, back 50 years ago. Every single one of these features has since been adopted by mainstream scripting languages. What still sets Lisp apart is its metalinguistic capability - macros (hygienic or not).
The main difference between Lisp and most other languages out there is that Lisp has been designed for computing with symbolic data.
(+ a b) is a Lisp expression
'(+ a b) is Lisp data
Some languages have similar capabilities that can be used easily (Prolog, Mathematica, ...). Some have it in difficult variants, where one has to deal with complex representations. Others simply represent programs as strings and not more.
A DSL family based on a flexible core (with a lispish intermediate language even) might be a viable approach.
In many situations, simplicity and restrictions (constraints) in DSLs is better than flexibility and expressiveness in a general purpose language, because it can offer new possibilities for domain specific optimizations due to domain specific constraints.
Just like new notations in math led to breakthroughs in many math branches, new syntax can bring new life to software in many specific domains.
The key to such systems seems to be making DSLs easy to build and optimize using a suite of common building blocks (human (cs people) friendly intermediate languages (like lisp as opposed to VM byte codes) and libraries.)
Risking being downmodded, I'd say Lisp is too "low level" for many common problems, which is great if your domain is parser/compiler construction/transformation/combination. I have no problem with lisp syntax (I can even tolerate C++ templates :), but it (and most general purpose languages) feels less natural for many domain specific problems than languages catering to the domains. A DSL family based on a flexible co…
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Why would adopting language X's features make X less awesome?
Because awesome is usually used in a relative sense -- something is awesome compared to other stuff . The implicit other stuff is "everything else."
Yesterday we saw an awesome game.
The sound of the new stereo is awesome.
The view from that skyscraper is awesome.
Yesterday I saw the most awesome game.
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Right. Mainstream languages have been gradually evolving towards Lisp but until they adopt a simple uniform syntax they won't get real macros, which I think is the biggest difference between Lisp and other languages today.
I believe that appreciating Lisp's minimalistic, tree-like syntax requires a very mathematical way of thinking. Many (perhaps most) developers have a different way of thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, diversity is a good thing but because of that, I don't think that the S-Expression syntax will ever become "mainstream".
XML is full of prefix, nested syntax.