On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 12:30 +0000, rob_at_robmyers.org wrote:
> There's the execution model and then there's the syntax.
>
> Haskell has an excellent execution model with all sorts of functional
> and type-based goodness. Likewise, Perl has brilliant regexps and IO
> facilities. They then wrap this in syntax that looks like line noise.
I agree the array/scalar/hash context stuff can make Perl look ugly,
until you're familiar enough with it to be able to see through it. And
the inbuilt regex (being largely a language of icons rather than words)
looks ugly from being so dense (the /x modifier helps).
But what in the syntax of haskell do you find ugly? To me, the syntax
is incredibly clean and well defined.
> There is rarely any causal link between execution model and syntax or
> representation.
Yes good point. I think to the trained eye, the aesthetics of language
syntax matter much less than that of the semantics.
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.
alex
Received on Fri Jan 04 2008 - 12:52:41 GMT