What most people have with Lisp syntax, I have with Objective-c. I am mostly blind to syntax (I skip from language to language fast reading/writing) except for some esoteric languages (like http://www.hakank.org/k/) AND Objective-c. I find it extremely annoying to read while I do it every day. Writing is better for some reason, but far removed from other languages. So I see why some people would not like Lisp syntax while I find it very pleasant/enjoyable to read.
Lisp is Abstract Syntax
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're hard-wired for Lisp. Broca's area 44,45 and 47 are responsible for processing hierarchical structures.[1] That's why it's so easy to reason about Lisp code. [1] http://www.letras.ufrj.br/poslinguistica/recursion/papers/17...
I don't see what that specifically has to do with Lisp. Virtually every programming language in use has a recursive hierarchical structure.
The code itself is hierarchical in nature.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is grokking Lisp's parenthesized s-expressions actually difficult though? I think that the real problem is that developers believe that they will find it difficult before they try it, rather than actually finding it difficult when they eventually do try it. I don't think I've ever picked up another class of languages faster; even python took more effort from me. Basically, I think it's a marketing problem.
I have to respectfully disagree. I have coded for years in a lot of C-style languages, mainly C, Java, Python, Ruby & JavaScript and I've been struggling with the Clojure book (and various tutorials) for over a year. It's not just marketing, it's a very different mindset and one I'm not convinced is ever going to appeal to a large class of smart programmers (yes I guess I'm saying I don't think I'm dumb and hope I'm…
Are you using automatic indentation, parenthesis matching, and highlighting the current s-expression? Lisp environments have, or can be given, a lot of tools to make the syntax easier to follow at first.
You may already have heard about those things - but I just thought I'd mention them on the off-chance you haven't.
Personally I find the syntax a lot easier to read - less giving up syntax than eliminating what's always looked like a bit of a mess to me ^^ Though, horses for course maybe, as you say.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#14Well, yeah. I think the popularity of lisp comes down to the hostility the mit ai lab had towards noam chomsky who in the 1960s spoke out about the vietnam war and thus bit the hand that funds cs research. All other computer languages (except for forth) embraced formal grammar concepts but mit rejected them out of spite. If mit had stopped burning the dragon book and embraced algol syntax we might have been spared th…
Huh. I was around the AI Lab in the late 1970s -- as an undergrad -- and I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Chomsky in the way you imagine. DARPA funding was still flowing rather freely, it seemed to me, well into the mid-1980s. I don't recall anyone suggesting that there would have been yet more DoD money if it hadn't been for Chomsky. And the grad student I did some work for, who was working on natural language parsing, was clearly intimately familiar with Chomsky's ideas on transformational grammar and referred to them throughout his dissertation.
So this isn't ringing true for me.
I also recall Gerry Sussman speaking quite highly of Algol 60.
No, I think you're quite wrong: the reasons for the popularity of Lisp at the AI Lab have to do with its actual advantages over other languages for the kinds of problems they were working on.
And there is an example of a language in the MIT tradition with infix syntax: Dylan. Great language, but wasn't in the right place at the right time to catch on.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#15I have yet to hear a good explanation why homoiconicity is a good thing or in any way easier to learn. My main problem is that you have to know all the same things, but they become unknown unknowns. Not being able to tell at a glance that the argument list in a lambda expression, as one of the most common examples, is doing something other than execute code is very confusing if you're expecting everything to follow the (func arg1 arg2) pattern. On the other hand, when you encounter different syntax, it's immediately obvious that you need to know something else - a known unknown, which is easier to correct.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#16What I think this is missing which was a huge part of the SICP course is that Lisp is probably the best language to write your own language in with a custom syntax tailored for the problem space you're working on. Even if it isn't trivial to do.
An example is Clojure's Hiccup[0] where there's a whole new syntax for dynamic HTML generation. It's not a full new Turing-complete language, but it's a custom syntax and vocabulary that illustrates Lisp's extensibility (a sample of Hiccup in action is linked below, though it isn't mine.)
[0] - https://github.com/yokolet/hiccup-samples/blob/master/src/hi...
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#17The abstract syntax was intended to be used writing programs until designers could get around to creating a concrete syntax with human-readable punctuation (instead of Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses), but programmers soon got used to programming directly in abstract syntax. That's some programmers who got used to the syntax. It may be absolutely true that once you get used to LISP's syntax, it is better than an…
Is grokking Lisp's parenthesized s-expressions actually difficult though? I think that the real problem is that developers believe that they will find it difficult before they try it, rather than actually finding it difficult when they eventually do try it. I don't think I've ever picked up another class of languages faster; even python took more effort from me. Basically, I think it's a marketing problem.
That's the wrong metric.
I learned Scheme over 20 years ago and it wasn't that hard to use it for small college projects. But that's different from being comfortable working with large code bases full of unfamiliar code.
Languages shouldn't be judged by how easy it is to write code, or read your own code, but rather how easy it is to jump into someone else's project and figure out what they did. The level of understanding should be enough to see security bugs when they screwed up.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is grokking Lisp's parenthesized s-expressions actually difficult though? I think that the real problem is that developers believe that they will find it difficult before they try it, rather than actually finding it difficult when they eventually do try it. I don't think I've ever picked up another class of languages faster; even python took more effort from me. Basically, I think it's a marketing problem.
That's the wrong metric. I learned Scheme over 20 years ago and it wasn't that hard to use it for small college projects. But that's different from being comfortable working with large code bases full of unfamiliar code. Languages shouldn't be judged by how easy it is to write code, or read your own code, but rather how easy it is to jump into someone else's project and figure out what they did. The level of understa…
I think those problems stem from the embrace of metaprogramming, the creation of DSLs, and language oriented programming. I don't think that Lisp's typical lack of syntax is to blame there.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#19What I think this is missing which was a huge part of the SICP course is that Lisp is probably the best language to write your own language in with a custom syntax tailored for the problem space you're working on. Even if it isn't trivial to do. An example is Clojure's Hiccup[0] where there's a whole new syntax for dynamic HTML generation. It's not a full new Turing-complete language, but it's a custom syntax and voc…
This one of the reasons why, as a Lisp programmer, I don't care much for Clojure. Three different bracketing constructs when one would do just fine. Now I have to go look up the difference between () and {} and [] just to emit some HTML.
Re: Lisp is Abstract Syntax
#20Well, yeah. I think the popularity of lisp comes down to the hostility the mit ai lab had towards noam chomsky who in the 1960s spoke out about the vietnam war and thus bit the hand that funds cs research. All other computer languages (except for forth) embraced formal grammar concepts but mit rejected them out of spite. If mit had stopped burning the dragon book and embraced algol syntax we might have been spared th…
Poe's law? Honestly can't tell.
Perhaps lisp programmers like the idea of composition, and decades later we still have no useful method for composing formal grammars? When we instead use a uniform tree structure and replace syntax with vocabulary, the problem disappears, and we only need to be concerned with composing the semantics of different "languages".
Or maybe they also like being able to quote some tree structure and treat it as code, or quote some code an treat it as data too - without the need for some genius to create an "API" to serialize and deserialize the data, and re-implement the compiler/interpreter.
Oh, if you need a feature, you could always ask the developers of your formal syntax to add it to the language, then wait a few years for the next revision to come around.