4 ms·
"Can you read something written in the language and figure out what it does" is wildly different from "can you write something new in the language". This is tes
by eridius 7y ago
"Can you read something written in the language and figure out what it does" is wildly different from "can you write something new in the language". This is testing the first, but I would argue that any even moderately-experienced software engineer could read the majority of programming languages out there without too much difficulty.
- masswerk 7y agoI think, it serves its purpose pretty well. All those parantheses of a real-world Lisp program may be quit intimidating, but here you get it pretty easily. And I believe as well that a programmer with a bit of experience should get the examples right, since familiarity and naming of things should help with the more complex examples. E.g., you know what a factorial is. And even, if you don't know the quicksort algorithm, you get it that there's some middle and a left side and a right side and some comparison. So it has to be some kind of sorting algorithm, and from there you may figure out the details, which again solidifies your understanding of the basic language concepts.
- asplake 7y agoExcept that what’s being taught here isn’t much more than just prefix notation and the simplest possible list examples. Without exposure to lambdas and more interesting data structures you’ve barely started. It’s fun but it doesn’t live up to its title.
- eridius 7y agoRight, but the point is you could pick almost any arbitrary language, show some basic examples, and people would be able to read it. For example, take someone who's never seen Lua and show them the exact same set of examples written in Lua, and they'd be able to answer the same questions. Hell, you could probably do it with Haskell too, even though nobody would ever pretend that you could "Learn you a Haskell in 0 minutes".