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Lisp has too many parentheses...

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41–50 of 81 posts

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That honestly looks more like a failure on the part of the Python library maintainer to create a pleasant way to create record prototypes. I mean, all you're doing in your list example is creating dictionary and list examples of the mapping you want. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that in Python.

creators = [{"name" :{"name_authority" :TextField, "name_authority_id" :IntegerField, "display_string" :TextField}, "user_id" :IntegerField, "roles" :[TextField], "attrs" :[TextField], "xts" :[TextField]}] Yes you could do something like this. But the lack of keywords does reintroduces some noise via the quotes around strings. Moving the colons around like this to give visual alignment would probably be frowned upon.…

Use single quotes; less noise.

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That honestly looks more like a failure on the part of the Python library maintainer to create a pleasant way to create record prototypes. I mean, all you're doing in your list example is creating dictionary and list examples of the mapping you want. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that in Python.

creators = [{"name" :{"name_authority" :TextField, "name_authority_id" :IntegerField, "display_string" :TextField}, "user_id" :IntegerField, "roles" :[TextField], "attrs" :[TextField], "xts" :[TextField]}] Yes you could do something like this. But the lack of keywords does reintroduces some noise via the quotes around strings. Moving the colons around like this to give visual alignment would probably be frowned upon.…

who writes code like that?

    creators = [
        {
            "name": {
                "name_authority": TextField,
                "name_authority_id": IntegerField,
                "display_string": TextField
            },
            "user_id" :IntegerField,
            "roles": [TextField],
            "attrs": [TextField],
            "xts": [TextField]
        }
    ]

anyway

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#44
post #3

Gaaah, knock off the CAPSLOCK and the machismo, please. Also, you don't need to invent backcronyms for CAR/CDR, they're now called first/rest. Having said that, I really like the presentation of your blog, nice typography. And after skimming your book[1] in progress, and noting your obvious theoretical bent and taste for rigor, I can only anticipate to read more of your future posts (latch on to something "obscure" l…

So when you call them first and rest, how do you destructure lists of lists? Actually, now that I think about it, "fire" is much cooler sounding than "cadr". But not as cool sounding as cadadr.

destructuring-bind ;)

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#45
post #17

Man all the hype about Lisp just suddenly made sense to me. Why do we need all this other stuff? Loved the simple exposition and backronyms, contrary to some other opinions here.

We definitely don't need all the fluff, and I like the philosophical cleanliness of Lisp (from a distance), but to me it seems like too basic of a building block to think with. Haskell's point free style and K's vector building blocks seem more useful to me for use in philosophical reasoning about algorithms.

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#46
Does anyone else have trouble with making the distinction between curly braces and parenthesis?

I'm pretty near sighted, so I always have to squint to figure out if something is a brace or a paren. I think it is one of the main reasons I like lisp...

There are no braces, and all I have to do is make sure that emacs indents everything properly (ctrl+alt+q at top of form... in my head I call it 'regrinding') so I know that the forms I've written have the closing parens in the proper places.

I know people complain about the parens, but I spend literally no time fudging with the formatting of my lisp code.. emacs just does it. Java and C code, however I always end up fiddling with (even with an 'advanced' IDE like eclipse).

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#48
post #3

Gaaah, knock off the CAPSLOCK and the machismo, please. Also, you don't need to invent backcronyms for CAR/CDR, they're now called first/rest. Having said that, I really like the presentation of your blog, nice typography. And after skimming your book[1] in progress, and noting your obvious theoretical bent and taste for rigor, I can only anticipate to read more of your future posts (latch on to something "obscure" l…

The bigger problem is that CAR and CDR actually mean something without the silly anatomy analogies.

The first thing I noticed too, then I stopped reading :(

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#49
post #40

Anyone manage to build a Lisp that used semantic indentation (like Python)? You could make it optional and just have it function as a preprocessor that generates the real thing.

I find this amusing because I've always found "lisp has too many parenthesis" and "python has too much significant whitespace" to be roughly equivalent in terms of relevance.

Nobody writes tools that randomly shred parentheses, but this happens all the time with whitespace. I'm halfway convinced Ruby is encroaching on Python because you can't really talk about the latter on the web without ridiculous workarounds.

Re: Lisp has too many parentheses...

#50
"too many parenthesis" is simply a flag that someone is speaking only about his initial emotional response, not out of actual use experience or measurement. When you actually count parenthesis in equivalent programs in C (or C-like syntax) and Lisp, they are almost exactly the same. When you include the ;.->*& -stuff, C starts to lose because `foo.bar();´ in C becomes simply `(bar foo)´ in Lisp.
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