3 ms·
Yes! It's mostly S-Expressions! However, the magic happens when you remove the parens and go to 2 and 3 dimensions. Think of Javascript, which has 20 million u
by breck 6y ago
Yes! It's mostly S-Expressions!
However, the magic happens when you remove the parens
and go to 2 and 3 dimensions. Think of Javascript,
which has 20 million users, versus Excel, which has 2
billion^1.
To paraphrase Twain, removing one thing can be the difference
between a lightning bug and lightning.
[1] Numbers are approximate.
- ar-nelson 6y agoCould you give an example (or a link) that demonstrates this higher-dimensional syntax? Are there things you can express with it that couldn't be expressed in S-expressions?
- breck 6y ago> Are there things you can express with it that couldn't be expressed in S-expressions? No. But that may be like asking "is there something I can do with the x86 that I couldn't do with any Turing Machine?" Pragmatically speaking when you factor in UX and time there are things that are dramatically faster with Tree Notation versus S-Expressions. For example, here's the editing experience for an upcoming DSL to enable non-programmer researchers to put together topical exploratory data analysis tools: https://github.com/treenotation/random-demos/blob/main/Screen%20Recording%202020-12-21%20at%206.51.02%20AM.mov https://github.com/treenotation/random-demos/blob/main/Scree... Lots of things that are muscle memory to Excel users (drag to fill, copy/paste blocks, move columns and rows, et cetera), would be very ugly/hard to do if we were using paren based S-Expression notation.