Re: [dev] [OT]: Go programming language

2009/11/12 markus schnalke <meillo_AT_marmaro.de>:
> You said something like that a quick look at the syntax lets you judge
> if it is clean/nice/whatever or not.
>
> I posted the above quote to show you that even simple things may not
> be easy to see.

I said "It doesn't take long to judge clarity". If it's not easy to
see, it's not clear.

> So tell me: What's the difference between ``it has a not so
> strange/different syntax'' and ``it has a nicer syntax''.

One of them I said, the other I didn't.

> ``Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you
> will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a
> better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never
> actually use Lisp itself a lot.'' (Eric Raymond)
>
> You can take the impressions people share with you, or leave them --
> it's your decision.

The only impression I've gathered so far is a religious belief that
Lisp is 'just better'. I'm a man of science, I require hard evidence.

I decided to try and have a go at writing a simple 'cat' replacement
in Lisp earlier, should be simple right? Wrong. Every resource I came
across told great tales of epic adventures into middle earth and how
Lisp was the One Ring, in torrents of text sprawled on drab pages
'designed' by people who's life goal is clearly to bore you to death,
without giving any valuable information as to how I might achieve my
goal.

On a note on Lisp's grammar, I totally agree with what Jessta said in
their e-mail.

2009/11/12 Dmitry Maluka <dmitrymaluka_AT_gmail.com>:
> You have no clue what Lisp is. It's a meta-language. See below.
> Lisp syntax is a meta-syntax. With lisp macros, you can easily subdue
> the language syntax to your needs.

So show me.

> C preprocessor is stupid. C macros are ugly and dangerous, except of
> simplest cases.

I totally agree that the C pre-processor sucks. It's ill thought out
and needs replacing. However, going back to what you were saying about
you being able to subdue Lisp's syntax with macros, any language that
requires macros to hide its syntax is poorly designed. Macros are
there to aid programming. You shouldn't need to create a new language
out of macros to get the job done, otherwise you might as well just
use another language in the first place.

> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 06:16:00AM +1100, Jessta wrote:
>> Lisp has the 'everything is a list' problem and there is lots of
>> behaviour that doesn't fit well in to this. Consistancy can make
>> things intuitive, but you shouldn't sacrifice intuitiveness for
>> consistancy.
>
> Lisp does not have this problem. You have no clue what is Lisp.

Are you denying that Lisp's primary concept is that it treats
everything as a list?
Received on Fri Nov 13 2009 - 03:47:46 UTC