3 ms·

> discussed since the early 1960s. I've taking part in such discussions myself since the mid 80s. You have me beat, if being older is winning. But I was lurki

by xscott 4y ago

> discussed since the early 1960s. I've taking part in such discussions myself since the mid 80s. You have me beat, if being older is winning. But I was lurking on comp.lang.lisp before web browsers were a thing too... > Lisp does not have an 'arbitrary' indentation and closing brace style. Heh, that word seems to bother both you and kazinator. I didn't mean it as an insult. :-)

lispm 4y ago
'being older is not a virtue in itself' (using one of your phrases), more interesting would be the experience of actually seeing people and helping them trying to learn Lisp in different settings. For example: at the local university we had several hundred students each year who had to learn Lisp and/or Scheme (and other programming language) as part of their extensive computer science introductory courses - most students had no prior knowledge of Lisp. That was at a time when we used printer terminals or vt terminals to edit code. Later one could see students who could do programming homework on their personal computers or with UNIX workstations at the University...
- xscott 4y ago
  That's good context. Thank you for the reply. A few years back, both my brother and father wanted to learn to program. Actually, relearn in the case of my dad. He was doing assembly programming for fun when I was a kid, and he taught me Basic. So really, he wanted to re-learn after a 30 or more year hiatus. I tried to turn them both on to DrScheme (PLT wasn't named Racket yet). I figured the language is elegant, the tool is friendly, it's got libraries for tons of things, and the syntax is really simple. Kind of the "learn the language in the first part of the first chapter" approach in SICP, and then get to doing something fun. It's a much better language, environment, library, and implementation than Python. But it really didn't pan out. I'm sure we can blame me for being a poor teacher, but my brother got turned off completely, and my father seemed pretty annoyed it wasn't anything like he remembered. After that, I showed him Python, and he ran with it for a few months before he switched back to doing his pet projects in Excel. He's older than both of us, so he can do whatever he wants :-) Anyways, I kind of like Scheme, and I've been installing various implementations of it on my computers for the last two decades. Of course I must not like it that much, because I almost never use it for my pet projects. Maybe that's because I like numerical stuff and am too lazy to sort out an infix macro that makes me happy. It's just easier to use Python or C++ (or lately, Rust). Elsewhere, you made the comment "The Lisp version looks similar to the Python code, plus parentheses". Apparently it wasn't obvious, but that was intentional :-) I just wonder why people (like my father) find Python so accessible, when you can make Scheme look nearly identical if you ignore the parens. In every way that counts, Scheme is at least as expressive and has much better implementations than Python... Yet people prefer Python. If I ever make my own compiler, I'm inclined to use parens as delimiters for expressions. I'll spare you the details, but it won't really be a Lisp, and it would be more block structured. I only bring this up because in your first reply above where you were proselytizing and pontificating, you were already preaching to the choir. Since that OP way up there made a comment about it not scanning well (looking at it with blurry text), I wanted to hear from someone who doesn't like Lisp what it would take to make it likable. And of course all my comment did was draw attention from two people that want to defend Lisp. :-)

by xscott 4y ago

lispm 4y ago

'being older is not a virtue in itself' (using one of your phrases), more interesting would be the experience of actually seeing people and helping them trying to learn Lisp in different settings. For example: at the local university we had several hundred students each year who had to learn Lisp and/or Scheme (and other programming language) as part of their extensive computer science introductory courses - most students had no prior knowledge of Lisp. That was at a time when we used printer terminals or vt terminals to edit code. Later one could see students who could do programming homework on their personal computers or with UNIX workstations at the University...

xscott 4y ago
That's good context. Thank you for the reply. A few years back, both my brother and father wanted to learn to program. Actually, relearn in the case of my dad. He was doing assembly programming for fun when I was a kid, and he taught me Basic. So really, he wanted to re-learn after a 30 or more year hiatus. I tried to turn them both on to DrScheme (PLT wasn't named Racket yet). I figured the language is elegant, the tool is friendly, it's got libraries for tons of things, and the syntax is really simple. Kind of the "learn the language in the first part of the first chapter" approach in SICP, and then get to doing something fun. It's a much better language, environment, library, and implementation than Python. But it really didn't pan out. I'm sure we can blame me for being a poor teacher, but my brother got turned off completely, and my father seemed pretty annoyed it wasn't anything like he remembered. After that, I showed him Python, and he ran with it for a few months before he switched back to doing his pet projects in Excel. He's older than both of us, so he can do whatever he wants :-) Anyways, I kind of like Scheme, and I've been installing various implementations of it on my computers for the last two decades. Of course I must not like it that much, because I almost never use it for my pet projects. Maybe that's because I like numerical stuff and am too lazy to sort out an infix macro that makes me happy. It's just easier to use Python or C++ (or lately, Rust). Elsewhere, you made the comment "The Lisp version looks similar to the Python code, plus parentheses". Apparently it wasn't obvious, but that was intentional :-) I just wonder why people (like my father) find Python so accessible, when you can make Scheme look nearly identical if you ignore the parens. In every way that counts, Scheme is at least as expressive and has much better implementations than Python... Yet people prefer Python. If I ever make my own compiler, I'm inclined to use parens as delimiters for expressions. I'll spare you the details, but it won't really be a Lisp, and it would be more block structured. I only bring this up because in your first reply above where you were proselytizing and pontificating, you were already preaching to the choir. Since that OP way up there made a comment about it not scanning well (looking at it with blurry text), I wanted to hear from someone who doesn't like Lisp what it would take to make it likable. And of course all my comment did was draw attention from two people that want to defend Lisp. :-)