the cons chain of arrows certainly reminded me of why deep nested structural syntactic sugar is a pain..
The Land of Lisp
11–20 of 146 posts
Re: The Land of Lisp
#12I've read this book, and what I love about it is that it really brings to mind the programming books of my youth, when nobody would argue that programming should be fun. It's goofy, has bad jokes, and you learn something. Having said that, the code style seemed quite idiomatic compared to some of the other Lisp I've seen (although I'm no expert), so I wasn't sure how valuable the lessons were.
> seemed quite idiomatic I'm not sure how that would be a bad thing. Did you mean un idiomatic?
A common complaint about Lisp code in general is that programmers tend to write code that is idiosyncratic [ED: I previously used the word "idiomatic" here in reply to the OP but was conflating terms, making this post rather irrelevant but at least it provoked a discussion] (i.e. rather than looking like templated design patterns with standard names, the program is heirarchically built of modules in a domain-specific language of the programmer's own design). This is both one of Lisp's greatest strengths to those who like it, and (I think, based on comments I've seen here and elsewhere) one of the greatest reasons it doesn't have more widespread adoption.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#13There's also Realm of Racket https://realmofracket.com/ Which maybe is shorter? I don't recall.
The real question is whether it has a sequel to Grand Theft Wumpus in it
Re: The Land of Lisp
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really liked going through Realm of Racket with my 11 year old daughter. It pretty much is the same format. It made me miss the days of typing code from a book and hit run. (Well run never really worked then it was hours of debugging but that taught me so much)
Ha yes! Bonus points when the book is for IBM Basic, and you're using a Commodore 64. Argggggg!
I loved it when they didn't say what basic it was for. My dad ended up meeting a author of a few of the programs and he said, "Oh I never got that basic program to ever run." My dad was like my 9 year old fix it and walked away. He was proud and mad. It took me weeks to get things fixed.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really liked going through Realm of Racket with my 11 year old daughter. It pretty much is the same format. It made me miss the days of typing code from a book and hit run. (Well run never really worked then it was hours of debugging but that taught me so much)
Ha yes! Bonus points when the book is for IBM Basic, and you're using a Commodore 64. Argggggg!
Childhood TRS-80 user here, can commiserate.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> seemed quite idiomatic I'm not sure how that would be a bad thing. Did you mean un idiomatic?
A common complaint about Lisp code in general is that programmers tend to write code that is idiosyncratic [ED: I previously used the word "idiomatic" here in reply to the OP but was conflating terms, making this post rather irrelevant but at least it provoked a discussion] (i.e. rather than looking like templated design patterns with standard names, the program is heirarchically built of modules in a domain-specific…
"rather than looking like templated design patterns" - that is, the code goes straight to the point instead of being littered with incidental noise and ceremony? How that could possibly be a bad thing? Well, in certain software development subcultures ceremony might be a norm, but not in general.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#17I've read most of it too, but not sure it shows a lot of lisp's strengths. A lot of the programs I read them over and thought that I could do the same thing in significantly less Python code. I'm not sure what should be fixed if anything though.
> A lot of the programs I read them over and thought that I could do the same thing in significantly less Python code.
My racket code is usually many time smaller then my Python code. The nice thing about Racket/Lisp is you can just make your own tools when in Python you copy thousands of lines of code into a one line code.
The real fix that Lisp/Racket gives over Python is deployment.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
A common complaint about Lisp code in general is that programmers tend to write code that is idiosyncratic [ED: I previously used the word "idiomatic" here in reply to the OP but was conflating terms, making this post rather irrelevant but at least it provoked a discussion] (i.e. rather than looking like templated design patterns with standard names, the program is heirarchically built of modules in a domain-specific…
"rather than looking like templated design patterns" - that is, the code goes straight to the point instead of being littered with incidental noise and ceremony? How that could possibly be a bad thing? Well, in certain software development subcultures ceremony might be a norm, but not in general.
[deleted]
Re: The Land of Lisp
#19Nicely explained.
On a side note, I noticed with deep satisfaction that “git” is used as some kind of curse in the land of Lisp.
Re: The Land of Lisp
#20I've read this book, and what I love about it is that it really brings to mind the programming books of my youth, when nobody would argue that programming should be fun. It's goofy, has bad jokes, and you learn something. Having said that, the code style seemed quite idiomatic compared to some of the other Lisp I've seen (although I'm no expert), so I wasn't sure how valuable the lessons were.
> seemed quite idiomatic I'm not sure how that would be a bad thing. Did you mean un idiomatic?
I did, of course, mean idiosyncratic. My bad