Agree with some of the earlier comments: the diamond-shaped thingies inserted are really a nuisance and breaks the reading flow.
Why Racket? Why Lisp?
11–20 of 295 posts
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#12I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…
Yeah, middle clicking on the page to start a scroll got weird as well.
In defense of why-homoiconicity-is-cool: it's useful to build pipelines of things in code.
Imagine if you had a series of functions that manipulate an audio signal. You could create a pipeline of these on the fly just by putting the functions in a list, and then reflecting the data against it.
You can imagine exposing this to a user - they check some boxes saying what features they want, and then the pipeline gets assembled for them.
This would be do-able but laborious in Java.
Javascript and iolanguage are homoiconoic language without the parens emphasis.
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#13Please.... text-align: justify; ...
Please... see http://practicaltypography.com/justified-text.html for the author's opinion.
Personally I believe that Matthew is wrong there. There's no justification for justification. :-)
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#14Agree with some of the earlier comments: the diamond-shaped thingies inserted are really a nuisance and breaks the reading flow.
Maybe only because it's unfamiliar. After all, other punctuation doesn't break your flow. And trying to figure out whether something is a link or not also breaks flow.
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#15Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#16I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…
Yeah, middle clicking on the page to start a scroll got weird as well. In defense of why-homoiconicity-is-cool: it's useful to build pipelines of things in code. Imagine if you had a series of functions that manipulate an audio signal. You could create a pipeline of these on the fly just by putting the functions in a list, and then reflecting the data against it. You can imagine exposing this to a user - they check s…
> Imagine if you had a series of functions that manipulate an audio signal. You could create a pipeline of these on the fly just by putting the functions in a list, and then reflecting the data against it.
That's not an example of homoiconicity.
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#17I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…
For a book typsetting program that's trying to produce html without a lot of writing overhead, some of those features are pretty great. Steve Yegge has a related blog post (the context is emacs):
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#18I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…
As someone who writes Lisp (well, Clojure) every day and does not particularly enjoy it, I find the common complaint about parentheses to be a non-issue. In fact, I'm not sure I've heard of anyone who wrote any significant amount of lisp code and came away talking about parentheses. This seems to be mostly a reaction from people who've read a bit of Lisp without using it. Then again, I just noticed that I type ( and…
I would assume it'd be the same as people complaining about significant whitespace in python. No one who actually programs in python complains about the whitespace.
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#19I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…
If you've never had the possibility to do so before it's not surprising that you never felt the need to do it. Languages affect your way of thinking and implementing algorithms.
On the other hand, once you've tried the sweet honey of lisp macros, going back to C macros makes you sad. There's not a week that goes by without me being frustrated at the rudeness of C macros. Not to mention languages that don't offer a macrosystem at all. And the parens thing is a tired meme.
I agree with you for the diamonds though, very distracting.
Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who writes Lisp (well, Clojure) every day and does not particularly enjoy it, I find the common complaint about parentheses to be a non-issue. In fact, I'm not sure I've heard of anyone who wrote any significant amount of lisp code and came away talking about parentheses. This seems to be mostly a reaction from people who've read a bit of Lisp without using it. Then again, I just noticed that I type ( and…
I would assume it'd be the same as people complaining about significant whitespace in python. No one who actually programs in python complains about the whitespace.
> No one who actually programs in python complains about the whitespace.
I wouldn't say "no one." I read comments regularly from people, usually students, who get into trouble with whitespace in Python, especially if they mix tabs and spaces in the same source file.