21–30 of 81 posts
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.
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…
Actually, now that I think about it, "fire" is much cooler sounding than "cadr". But not as cool sounding as cadadr.
This argument/response comes up every time.... Argument: "Lisp has too many parentheses. It's unreadable." Response: "It's conceptually elegant that everything is parentheses." This doesn't address the real point -- you can't read it well. You do get advantages for macros and symbolic processing. But the cost in readability is still there.
I've yet to find Lisp any more or less readable then anything else I write day-to-day (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, HTML). In all these languages I find myself constantly fighting to find a readable and reasonable formatting. I certainly won't argue that I find myself doing this less in Lisp, but the readability argument is just something that continues to be bandied about by people who haven't spent much time prog…
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.
This argument/response comes up every time.... Argument: "Lisp has too many parentheses. It's unreadable." Response: "It's conceptually elegant that everything is parentheses." This doesn't address the real point -- you can't read it well. You do get advantages for macros and symbolic processing. But the cost in readability is still there.
My guess is that what people complain about isn't really the parentheses, but rather heavy nesting of Lisp programs compared to other languages. If parentheses were replaced with something else, they'd probably complain about that something else.
Seriously, the average nesting depth of a C program is maybe 3-4 (function, conditional, loop, etc), and C programs are simple. More complex languages like Java and C++ will easily have 4-7 levels of nesting on average. Clojure and Arc code are probably right on par with that.
And machine code printed in binary is all 1's & 0's. What could be more elegant than that?
This argument/response comes up every time.... Argument: "Lisp has too many parentheses. It's unreadable." Response: "It's conceptually elegant that everything is parentheses." This doesn't address the real point -- you can't read it well. You do get advantages for macros and symbolic processing. But the cost in readability is still there.
My guess is that what people complain about isn't really the parentheses, but rather heavy nesting of Lisp programs compared to other languages. If parentheses were replaced with something else, they'd probably complain about that something else.
It took me a long time to get used to this in functional programming, and I got annoyed with how deeply nested my code got. Then I learned that it was just the language telling me to decompose my functions! :-)
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.
Are you kidding? Mandating whitespace is possibly the single worse feature of python. Lisp editing is an extremely mature topic, and rarely does a lisp programmer have to actually deal with code formatting. To turn that on it's head would be madness. A complete step backward.
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.
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.
Other than that, excellent article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you kidding? Mandating whitespace is possibly the single worse feature of python. Lisp editing is an extremely mature topic, and rarely does a lisp programmer have to actually deal with code formatting. To turn that on it's head would be madness. A complete step backward.
You both have stupid arguments which basically boil down to "I don't like it because I prefer it the other way." This stupid flamewar has been fought countless times on countless online forums, let's not do this.
Mandating whitespace complicates the situation, and for what benifit? You're the one proposing a dramatic change, show some dramatic evidence to back up your proposition.