6 ms·

This is the problem I have with Lisp, but exponentially worse. Languages like this try and stretch ever-closer to an imaginary "perfectly pure language". It's a

• bunderbunder 8y ago
  Do you mean Scheme, specifically? Because I have a hard time seeing that in lisp in general. Racket's small but fairly pragmatic, Clojure is pretty big, and Common Lisp is frankly a bit of a kitchen sink language.
  • vinceguidry 8y ago
    Not your parent, but I personally didn't find S-expression syntax to be superior. Treating code as data and vice versa is metaprogramming, and it should be something you know how to do when you need it, easy enough to where you're not really going out of your way to do it when you do need it, but weird enough so that you can notice it and immediately see that you are going to need to put on your thinking cap in order to proceed further down the road of understanding this program, when you come across it. I've yet to see a better approach than Ruby's.
    • taeric 8y ago
      Amusingly, I've yet to hit as much frustration as I have when using a few ruby packages at work. Holy hell is it confusing to figure out where things came from, sometimes. I don't necessarily care for the data as code, most of the time; but I do like that most everything has a sensible way to serialize to a file. Even better, unless I am wanting to get optimized, the round trip can take care of itself. Curious what the syntax is for a basic list of key value pairs? Well, it is the same as any list of pairs. Which is the same as any list, unless you are trying to get fancy. This freedom really is liberating, at times. Yes, some folks have made macros so that they have a syntax to have a different literal for different styles of maps/tables/etc. By and large, life is easier if you don't use those and just stick to the minimal syntax necessary to do this. Which really helps with your concern. When I can see what the transformation is, I can literally substitute into my mental model what the macro is doing, so that I don't have to juggle a bunch of crap around. And all of this, oddly enough, lands you into not caring if you are calling to a function or a macro. I have more trust in calling things in most lisps I've worked with, because I can understand both ways in terms of themselves easily enough. With ruby, I'm often wary of using a new method in a source file, because I really can't trust all of the interactions that are assumed for it to work out.
      • NegativeLatency 8y ago
        To be fair there’s a lot of poorly designed hard to read ruby meta programming out there. I find that the language is flexible enough that I never really reach for meta programming when tackling problems.
        • taeric 8y ago
          I've always been amused by how quickly and deeply some people reach for meta programming. To the point that I really just don't get why.
      • vinceguidry 8y ago
        I'm not sure how much of our respective experiences is due to familiarity. For example, I have REPL power tools and a really good understanding of Ruby's object model to help me figure out what something's doing. So that almost never concerns me all that much. Whenever I pull in a new gem, I usually budget a few minutes to wrap my head around the semantics of how the gem is expected to be used. Occasionally the documentation isn't good enough and I need to source dive. What I never have to deal with is new syntax. No matter how Ruby is being used, the syntax is always the same comforting, pleasing-to-read near-prose. What changes when you use metaprogramming in Ruby is semantics. You can't add new syntax to the language unless you actually change the language. Like you, I find people misusing metaprogramming. For me usually this is fairly easy to detect. If I look for the source of a method and it's dynamically generated, then showing the source will take me to where it was generated. I won't pretend to have chosen Ruby over Lisp because I liked the language better. I chose it because I figured it would help me get a job better. But as time went on I found myself at home with Ruby. I don't think it would take me all that long to get used to any given Lisp. But I don't believe it actually gives anyone superpowers, at least, not superpowers you can't have with Ruby. I have yet to hear a lisper actually articulate a solid advantage for code as data. When there isn't any functional reason to choose between alternatives, all there's left is the aesthetic. Which is where all those parenthesis finally become important.
        • taeric 8y ago
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    Some Lisps indeed do away with the "minimalist" aspect when it comes to functionality, although I was mainly referring to syntax.
• Retra 8y ago
  There aren't any concepts here that are "palatable to the human mind." It's ok to have a bias, but don't be so foolish to pretend it is universal.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    There are some very abstract common threads in how the mind conceptualizes the world. See Gestalt Psychology: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology There's also this; a fascinating study that investigated the ways people intuitively try to articulate algorithms when they haven't been biased by experience with existing programming paradigms: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=373422 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=373422
    • Retra 8y ago
      >There are some very abstract common threads in how the mind conceptualizes the world. Of course, this means nothing pertaining to a preferred language, formal or natural, for encoding it such notions. >a fascinating study that investigated the ways people intuitively try to articulate algorithms Try to articulate algorithms. And generally fail, because they don't have any experience expressing complex systems in their shoddy, careless notation. Naturally, when the physicist sits down to express her algorithm using Lie theory and tensor calculus, she's really a moron because one should obviously grab an inexperience lay person and have them dictate your notation for you. The natural consequence of this is that you'll see things you couldn't have seen before and discover many novel and interesting structures in the language, through a process of lay magic.
      • _bxg1 8y ago
        There's no need to be rude. Just as using a more computer-compatible language (assembly, at the extreme) more optimally utilizes the computer's available resources, using languages with cognition-compatible paradigms more optimally utilize the brain's available resources, reducing cognitive load and enabling anyone - intelligent engineer or layperson - to express and mentally parse greater and more complex concepts than they otherwise would have been able to. The power of the Lisp syntax comes from the fact that everything looks the same, but this also makes it harder for a human to parse. For example, using different symbols to wrap function arguments than you do to wrap procedural blocks gives the brain something to latch on to, reducing the cognition necessary to differentiate between the two. This is also why code editors make the same types of tokens the same color. Two big takeaways from the linked study were that event-based programming and set-based operations are intuitive. These aren't layperson schlock, these are real paradigms. Every notation, every language, is made-up. There's nothing fundamentally more true about one or the other; each offers different metaphors for expressing complex concepts. The question is what those metaphors should be, and in my experience many programmers don't think about general human cognition when deciding which to prefer.
• wmf 8y ago
  These really minimal languages aren't intended for programmers; they're compiler targets for higher-level languages. So the debate about jets is really about how best to implement language runtimes.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the clarification
• arethuza 8y ago
  Arguably, that "perfectly pure language" has existed longer than programming has - lambda calculus.