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Why Racket? Why Lisp?

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Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#21
post #19
post #6

I 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 ma…

The first macro system I learned was Clojure's. Only once have I used a C style macro, and that was in my assembly class.

I noticed the article mentions that some don't like calling syntax extensions macros because of the comparison to Common Lisp macros. To that, I say that's a crazy way of thinking. Macros are necessarily dependent upon the semantics of the language they are for, so anybody who thinks that all macro systems are identical are the people who probably wouldn't go out of their way to learn a language with a non-textual substitution macro system, so changing the name for that purpose seems foolish. On the other hand, syntax-extension or syntax-transformations are a more descriptive term on their own merits.

And yeah, the diamonds are silly. Better to just color the word.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#22
post #9
post #6

I 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…

If you write Lisp every day why not remap the ( and ) to a non-shifted position? I use the [ and ] keys but I use Common Lisp, not Clojure.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#23
> If Lisp lan­guages are so great, then it should be pos­si­ble to sum­ma­rize their ben­e­fits in con­cise, prac­ti­cal terms.

His list is concise but man did he take a while to get to it!

Seriously though. The introduction was super relevant as I have wondered the exact same question about Lisp myself. What features make it so praise-worthy? Maybe X-expressions isn't a core feature for everyone to appreciate, but the fact that everything is an S-expression is an understated value. People complain about its syntax, but alternate versions (so many reincarnations of parentheses-less Lisps) have never caught on.

The thing is, Lisp is no longer unique in its feature set, and languages with more standard forms of syntax have incorporated some of its features. But it is uncommon to find all of these listed features in one language. In the domain of data analysis where I do most of my work, it still makes me sad that XLISP-STAT has been supplanted by other languages which leave the user wanting.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#24
post #9
post #6

I 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…

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.

Whelp, now you have. Hi! :)

Although I sometimes miss the goodies homoiconicity brings, I much prefer the increased syntactic structure of other languages.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#25

Agree with some of the earlier comments: the diamond-shaped thingies inserted are really a nuisance and breaks the reading flow.

Indeed. Whenever you break convention like underlined and colored text for links you in general need to have a good reason.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#26
post #9
post #6

I 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…

It's a zombie complaint.

I feel it's actually easier with parenthesis because with always well formed lisp you get the benefit of incredible tools like paredit-mode which make it easier to type than in other languages and I say this as someone who does full time c++ with a fair bit of python, javascript and html and I only do lisp stuff as a hobby.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#27
post #9

Earlier 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.

I find it a pain and error prone when having to change indentation in python code. E.g. when adding an 'if' in front of a block of code. So easy to miss a line or mess up the indentation in the block itself and then you might not spot an error until run time.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#29
post #9

Earlier 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.

I program in python (and C/C++) and really dislike python's whitespace handling. I think giving semantic meaning to one of the least-standardized aspects of text (tabs/spaces) is a bad decision through and through.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#30
post #22
post #9

Earlier 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…

If you write Lisp every day why not remap the ( and ) to a non-shifted position? I use the [ and ] keys but I use Common Lisp, not Clojure.

FWIW In DrRacket the key ] inserts either ], }, or ) to close whatever is open.
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