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Why Janet? (2023)

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Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#91

Post by drob518 »

barrell wrote: post #50
rambrrest wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somehow i also never got the idea around these languages like lisp. I remember i studied them in school - but i quickly forgot and never got around to relearning it.

It took me probably 5 years of writing Clojure before it clicked. Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages. It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability…

Spot on. For me, it clicked with Common Lisp, 15 years after I graduated from university. Now, Clojure is my daily driver. And it’s extremely difficult to explain to people. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even try. You’re right about all the things you mentioned. Once you discover structural editing, everything else seems primitive, on the level of cavemen playing with rocks. But it’s not just one feature that makes Lisp better. It’s all of it which interrelates and creates a powerful synergy (I hate that word, but in this case it’s appropriate) that just isn’t matched by anything else. There are other languages that have a similar vibe, notably Forth and Prolog, but they are often misunderstood, too. Honestly, that’s my real test of whether someone is a senior programmer: do they understand and at least have an appreciation for these languages, even if they don’t program in them everyday.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#92

Post by the_af »

skeledrew wrote: post #76
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you ever try to explain object oriented programming languages and their benefits to the "average person on the street"?

Pretty straight-forward, as the world as we perceive it is made of objects with attributes, interacting with each other via their methods. OOP easily fits the brain of the average person in the street.

[dead]

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#93

Post by adrian_b »

IshKebab wrote: post #79
xigoi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit. I use Parinfer, which allows me to edit Janet as if it was an indentation-based language.

Yeah I mean I guess if you have to use that syntax, it's nice to have a better editor for it. But IMO the existence of that tool clearly demonstrates that the syntax is pretty bad.

All C-derived languages (e.g. Java and Rust) have a bad syntax, with tons of superfluous parentheses and many other superfluous tokens, like semicolons or commas.

This normally matters very little, because a good editor will always insert a complete template whenever you type something like "if", "for", "while" etc.

Most programmers are blind to the syntax defects with which they are accustomed and they notice only the syntax defects with which they are unfamiliar.

I would prefer a language with a good syntax, but unfortunately which programming languages have survived in widespread use has a poor correlation with the technical qualities of a language and especially a really negligible correlation with how good its syntax was.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#94

Post by the_af »

uka wrote: post #4

> But by allowing you to unquote literal functions, Janet makes it possible to write macros that are completely referentially transparent. These lisp guys really get excited over very abstract things. If you say this to an average person on the street they will probably try to run away.

> These lisp guys really get excited over very abstract things. If you say this to an average person on the street they will probably try to run away.

Referential transparency is a funny name for a very powerful feature which helps you understand what the program does better, it's not a deeply abstract thing. Don't let the name scare you.

You could ask "why the funny name"? Well, specialized professionals use specialized jargon, even for "normal stuff". It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Car mechanics also have weird names for car parts that are absolutely essential for the car and not that hard to understand if they explained them to you.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#97

Post by mr-pink »

9dev wrote: post #65
krinne wrote: post #3

This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.

> a community online where AI isnt allowed. This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.

not really, you can just ask people to do a shit job identifying traffic lights and motorcycles and they'll do it.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#98

Post by kitd »

probably_wrong wrote: post #18
krinne wrote: post #3

This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.

> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed. In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person. [1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now. [2] https://www.t…

Age verification with facial ID? ;)

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#99

Post by setopt »

aeonik wrote: post #15
setopt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure! Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on. > Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible…

I'm starting to prefer the s expression syntax when dealing with tree structures like json. I wonder if we were raised on tree based algebra if math would be easier to do, or harder. Like, solve for x. (= (+ (* 2 x) 3) 11) (= (* 2 x) (- 11 3)) (= (* 2 x) 8) (= x (/ 8 2)) (= x 4) Though this isn't too bad. (= (+ (pow x 2) (pow y 2)) (pow r 2))

I definitely prefer s-exps over both xml and json myself too!

Interesting question. Much of the difficulty does stem from mentally translating back and forth between conventional notation and s-exps too, since you can’t really avoid the standard notation when reading and writing math and physics papers. And current-day math and physics notation has been optimized to some extent for the infix notation; perhaps one would have invented more expressive higher-order functions or macros to denote s-exp math if that was what everyone used for centuries.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#100

Post by setopt »

aeonik wrote: post #15
setopt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure! Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on. > Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible…

I'm starting to prefer the s expression syntax when dealing with tree structures like json. I wonder if we were raised on tree based algebra if math would be easier to do, or harder. Like, solve for x. (= (+ (* 2 x) 3) 11) (= (* 2 x) (- 11 3)) (= (* 2 x) 8) (= x (/ 8 2)) (= x 4) Though this isn't too bad. (= (+ (pow x 2) (pow y 2)) (pow r 2))

I think also a lot of my objections could be worked around if one simply had a "math" macro that evaluates infix math notation as a DSL, similarly to how the CL "loop" macro does a DSL for iteration.

Perhaps this exists already somewhere?

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