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I love Lisp but every experienced lisper will tell you they don't see the parentheses, they look directly at the AST. Seeing the AST is, for me, highly visual (
by black-tea 8y ago
I love Lisp but every experienced lisper will tell you they don't see the parentheses, they look directly at the AST. Seeing the AST is, for me, highly visual (proper indentation is a must) and I wonder how a blind programmer could see that.
- jey 8y agoBlind people still have spatial reasoning.
- WJW 8y agoThey do, but their interface to the computer does not. Screen readers are inherently linear while a screen show two dimensions at once. Indentation is the primary way this happens in practice. (I suppose it would not be impossible for a programming language to have 3d layout projected onto the 2d screen, but I'm not aware of any mainstream languages that do this. Significant whitespace is fairly common of course and nonsignificant indentation is more common still)
- jey 8y agoGood point. I imagine something like vim's "folding" feature could be used to interactively navigate source code with a screen reader by successively opening the folds of interest.
- kbp 8y agoBy using something like Paredit to navigate the source by list structure. Reading and navigating are kind of mixed together.