Re: [livecode] non-linguistic programming

From: Rob Myers <rob_at_robmyers.org>
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:47:03 +0000

alex wrote:

> But what in the syntax of haskell do you find ugly? To me, the syntax
> is incredibly clean and well defined.

It is well defined as lots of punctuation and precedence that you have
to remember. :-)

I prefer chunkier, simpler syntaxes. Lisp is ideal for me because there
is no precedence to remember, but I like Algol-syntax languages like Lua
and Dylan as well for this reason (the chunkiness rather than the
precedence).

For anyone who thinks that Lisp users are snobs I'd point out that I am
arguing here that Lisp is easier for dumb users like me than Haskell. ;-)

> I was reading a nice mailing list post by a lisp person (sorry can't
> remember where) saying that they stopped 'seeing' the brackets after a
> day or so of learning lisp, and that people who complain about brackets
> in lisp should also complain about whitespace in all other languages.

A good code editor takes care of the parantheses, and the parantheses
make it easy for a code editor to do so in ways that would be much
harder with a less regular syntax.

Python is basically Lisp with whitespace rather than brackets. So yes if
telling all the brackets apart is a problem, think how hard it must be
to tell all the whitespace apart! ;-)

- Rob.
Received on Fri Jan 04 2008 - 19:47:59 GMT

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