Neat idea, although to be fair the examples are straw men. I think most people would indent their LISP much more readably.
Pretty Lisp
71–80 of 115 posts
Re: Pretty Lisp
#72This graphical representation of code structure seems reminiscent of http://scratch.mit.edu/
The problem with scratch is that code visualization kinda dies on the vine for procedural programs. For pure functional languages, each chunk of code is a world unto itself, and one can exploit this to make "visual proximity" correlate with "causal proximity". This is good for our eyes and brains because we don't have to look far to understand what is going in a certain part of a program. The underlying reason this c…
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Re: Pretty Lisp
#73Huh. I wouldn't call this pretty. Why do you need a box around everything? One of the arguments about Lisp is how visually distracting the parentheses are (and yes, experience Lisp hackers learn to tune them out; that doesn't change the fact that they are visually distracting); the boxes are even more visually distracting. To use Tufte's terminology, this is decreasing the data-ink ratio, not increasing it. Take a lo…
> how visually distracting the parentheses are (and yes, experience Lisp hackers learn to tune them out; that doesn't change the fact that they are visually distracting
I wouldn't call myself an experienced Lisp hacker, but I don't think the parentheses are visually distracting, any more than I think that the curly braces in C are distracting.
The only problem that I can really see with the parentheses-based S-expression syntax is the fact that it's not always immediately clear where a given S-expression begins and ends. This is a that's-a-feature-not-a-bug situation, though, because that visual ambiguity is a byproduct of the list-code symmetry that makes Lisp so powerful. This comes at the cost of some initial visual ambiguity. Even in Lisp, some sacrifices have to be made. The one thing that's a huge help, though, is Vim's auto-highlighting feature, which lets me know easily where the other half of a parentheses/brackets/etc. pair is. (This isn't unique to Lisp - it will do that for any open-close token pairs in any language).
Pretty Lisp seems to be an attempt to correct that more than it is an attempt to 'correct' the parentheses, which I view as a strength rather than a shortcoming of Lisp. A much simpler way to achieve that end goal would be to write a short Vim keybinding/plugin that would either automatically or manually (toggle on/off) highlight the entire function/list that the cursor is on, instead of just the opening and closing parentheses.
To me, that would be the best of both worlds, and it would probably be a very simple task for someone familiar with Vim configuration.
Re: Pretty Lisp
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of work do you do? Moving the work from what language? Do you not worry about having to pay huge licensing fees to run your code elsewhere?
Executive brief - Go high end, where the money is. Where results are valued. Licensing isn't an issue - $3K/year+libraries for development. A runtime player for Mathematica costs $300. You just have to pick your projects carefully - No rails todo apps. One recent project I worked on was auto segmentation and labelling of MRI images. Auto-segmentation was the easy part. Labelling however took several different approac…
This sounds like the kind of work that most people I know would choose matlab for (image segmentation). I personally have never used either for such, but do you have any thoughts on the matter? Is Mathematica getting better at the things matlab used to be best at?
Re: Pretty Lisp
#75I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a daily basis? We should be indistinguishable from magic by now. This is a (small) step in the right direction. Can we please live in the future already?
We switched from graphics to text a couple of thousand years ago and it's helped us a lot. People have been killing the command line for decades, yet anyone who uses a search engine is working with a cli.
Re: Pretty Lisp
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
One neat thing about working with Mathematica in Eclipse is that successive clicking expands your selection 'outwards' up the syntax tree. It's an quite astoundingly useful feature for refactoring. I'm sure some LISP editors have this too, but in a m-expression language like Mathematica it seems like magic.
When I was first learning elisp, one of the utilities I wrote was a flood-selection feature that sounds very similar to what you describe. Interestingly, it turned out to be quite useful in C code despite only being aware of string and paren (and brace and bracket) boundaries.
Re: Pretty Lisp
#77Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language whi…
> what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? This already exists: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el (you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png )
And here's a small survey of lisp expression highlighting UIs from a few years ago, "Five approaches to s-expression highlighting": http://lemonodor.com/archives/2005/08/five_approaches.html
Re: Pretty Lisp
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.
It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to Python/Ruby?
Re: Pretty Lisp
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I elaborate a bit on this point in my comment below about Scratch. My claim is that this 'pretty lisp' is still stuck in the flat-text mindset, doing something pretty much identical to indenting. Whereas what we really want are graphical (in the sense of network) editors.
Can you elaborate?
Not the gp, but I believe the idea is to stop displaying long columns of code like so much wallpaper and instead treat it like the directed multigraph it actually is.
Re: Pretty Lisp
#80There are much less distracting ways than thick rounded boxes to indicate indentations, starting with simple spaces.
A lot of Lisp programs look a lot better if you apply Python's space indentation for sexprs, for example.