3 ms·

> Lisp’s unusual syntax is connected to its expressive power. [...] It’s because of uniformity. Okay... > Lisp (and XML) have a uniform syntax. .. ookay. The

by senko 3y ago

> Lisp’s unusual syntax is connected to its expressive power. [...] It’s because of uniformity. Okay... > Lisp (and XML) have a uniform syntax. .. ookay. The rest of the arguments, and the conclusion, can then be equally applied to XML, specifically the: > I maintain that Common Lisp is the gold standard of DX for macros Does (s)he also maintain that XML is the gold standard of DX for macros? I guess that'd mean XSLT? ... Or the article is just trying to be too clever for its own good.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> I guess that'd mean XSLT? XSLT is amazing. And XSLT scripts are really hard to read - just like Lisp is (at least, it is to me).
- masklinn 3y ago
  The idea behind XSLT (match/patch) is amazing. Xslt itself is complete trash. - developing an entirely new language in XML was a meh idea, but it was severely lacking making using it difficult unless you were allowed to extend it via custom functions and elements - the template-as-transform and template-as-function confusion was completely unnecessary and made it much harder to learn and grok than necessary - but the worst mistake by far was the impliciteness and confusion of `.`, the thing is verbose as all hell, the implicit passing and transformation of the context was completely unwarranted, not unlike Perl’s magical side-effect unless you’re deep in the sauce it makes the entire thing a lot worse, and with even less payout given the general verbosity of XSLT and XML (in perl all the magic provides amazingly terse CLI commands, it’s just a shame people then used that in perl files)
- rjsw 3y ago
  XSLT is a lot harder to use than Lisp. Trying to debug some XSLT right now, every implementation processes the script differently, have reached the point of just declaring that it is broken and using something else. I should be writing Common Lisp, I get paid for that.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Trying to debug some XSLT right now Heh! I haven't touched XSLT for decades. I can't remember it enough to discuss its strengths and weaknesses; all I can remember (weaknesses) was that it dealt badly with namespaces. I think it was invented before XML namespaces came along, and the terseness of XSLT became a horrible mess in the face of namespaces. I remember being told in about 1996 that XML was the future; the guy that told me was my boss, who was a manager, not a techie. We worked for a document company, and in that sense I think he was right. So I put a fair bit of effort into learning to use XSLT to translate XML data notation into HTML presentation notation. XML never made the grade as a document notation, and literally nobody I knew wanted to know anything about XSLT. But yeah, XSLT was a lot like regular expressions - pretty much a write-only notation. Hmm - I just realised that I'm using the past tense, as if it was my dead uncle or something.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      [Sorry, commenting to self] I remember now. XSLT was indeed crap, all XML syntactic sugar. But the "XSLT" expressions were XPath, which existed before XSLT came along, and it's XPath that had no support for namespaces. And it's XPath that was concise, and ressembled regexes, and shared with regexes the write-only property. [Edit] So it's XPath that I think was amazing. Unfortunately it was bound to XML, which wasn't amazing.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
I'm not a Lisp person. But... XML and Lisp both have uniformity. What you can express in Lisp, you can express in XML. That's formally true. But once you've seen S-expressions, XML is so verbose that you want to throw up. You could do what Lisp does in XML, but your fingers would fall off from all the typing, and your eyes would glaze over from reading all the verbiage. You'd fall asleep before you got to the point. It's really hard to overstate how disgustingly ugly XML is after you've seen the same thing done in S-expressions. I knew XML, and then I learned what S-expressions are (though I don't program in Lisp), and the next time I saw XML I was shocked at how ugly, tedious, and verbose it was. So, yes, they're equivalent, and no, they're not. The verbosity matters, and it kills the usefulness of XML as a programming language. You could do it, but nobody wants to.
zetalyrae 3y ago
XML can be parsed and transformed more easily than a language with a more heterogeneous/specific syntax. This is obvious.
- senko 3y ago
  XML is absolutely not easily parsed, if you want to do it correctly. Unless you mean to say you can easily parse XML if you're using an XML parser library, in which case you can just as easily parse any other language using its parser: for example Python using its `ast` module.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - taeric 3y ago
    Most of the complications for parsing XML come down to entity resolution, and dealing with namespaces. Take those out, and it is back to trivial. That is, surface level parsing of an XML document is somewhat easier than other documents.
- aspyct 3y ago
  Parsed easily? Sorry, have you tried parsing XML?
tabtab 3y ago
I can intellectually see the power of Lisp, but in practice I find it's just really hard to read down the road, especially other people's Lisp. The visual cues provided by the "ugliness" of other languages do help reading (I gave examples nearby). Lisp is kind of like new tract homes: they look all the same such that it's easy to get lost. An old neighborhood with funny bent mailboxes and a mish-mash of house and yard styles is just easier to remember.

by senko 3y ago

denton-scratch 3y ago

> I guess that'd mean XSLT? XSLT is amazing. And XSLT scripts are really hard to read - just like Lisp is (at least, it is to me).

masklinn 3y ago
The idea behind XSLT (match/patch) is amazing. Xslt itself is complete trash. - developing an entirely new language in XML was a meh idea, but it was severely lacking making using it difficult unless you were allowed to extend it via custom functions and elements - the template-as-transform and template-as-function confusion was completely unnecessary and made it much harder to learn and grok than necessary - but the worst mistake by far was the impliciteness and confusion of `.`, the thing is verbose as all hell, the implicit passing and transformation of the context was completely unwarranted, not unlike Perl’s magical side-effect unless you’re deep in the sauce it makes the entire thing a lot worse, and with even less payout given the general verbosity of XSLT and XML (in perl all the magic provides amazingly terse CLI commands, it’s just a shame people then used that in perl files)
rjsw 3y ago
XSLT is a lot harder to use than Lisp. Trying to debug some XSLT right now, every implementation processes the script differently, have reached the point of just declaring that it is broken and using something else. I should be writing Common Lisp, I get paid for that.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Trying to debug some XSLT right now Heh! I haven't touched XSLT for decades. I can't remember it enough to discuss its strengths and weaknesses; all I can remember (weaknesses) was that it dealt badly with namespaces. I think it was invented before XML namespaces came along, and the terseness of XSLT became a horrible mess in the face of namespaces. I remember being told in about 1996 that XML was the future; the guy that told me was my boss, who was a manager, not a techie. We worked for a document company, and in that sense I think he was right. So I put a fair bit of effort into learning to use XSLT to translate XML data notation into HTML presentation notation. XML never made the grade as a document notation, and literally nobody I knew wanted to know anything about XSLT. But yeah, XSLT was a lot like regular expressions - pretty much a write-only notation. Hmm - I just realised that I'm using the past tense, as if it was my dead uncle or something.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    [Sorry, commenting to self] I remember now. XSLT was indeed crap, all XML syntactic sugar. But the "XSLT" expressions were XPath, which existed before XSLT came along, and it's XPath that had no support for namespaces. And it's XPath that was concise, and ressembled regexes, and shared with regexes the write-only property. [Edit] So it's XPath that I think was amazing. Unfortunately it was bound to XML, which wasn't amazing.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

I'm not a Lisp person. But... XML and Lisp both have uniformity. What you can express in Lisp, you can express in XML. That's formally true. But once you've seen S-expressions, XML is so verbose that you want to throw up. You could do what Lisp does in XML, but your fingers would fall off from all the typing, and your eyes would glaze over from reading all the verbiage. You'd fall asleep before you got to the point. It's really hard to overstate how disgustingly ugly XML is after you've seen the same thing done in S-expressions. I knew XML, and then I learned what S-expressions are (though I don't program in Lisp), and the next time I saw XML I was shocked at how ugly, tedious, and verbose it was. So, yes, they're equivalent, and no, they're not. The verbosity matters, and it kills the usefulness of XML as a programming language. You could do it, but nobody wants to.

zetalyrae 3y ago

XML can be parsed and transformed more easily than a language with a more heterogeneous/specific syntax. This is obvious.

senko 3y ago
XML is absolutely not easily parsed, if you want to do it correctly. Unless you mean to say you can easily parse XML if you're using an XML parser library, in which case you can just as easily parse any other language using its parser: for example Python using its `ast` module.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 3y ago
  Most of the complications for parsing XML come down to entity resolution, and dealing with namespaces. Take those out, and it is back to trivial. That is, surface level parsing of an XML document is somewhat easier than other documents.
aspyct 3y ago
Parsed easily? Sorry, have you tried parsing XML?

tabtab 3y ago

I can intellectually see the power of Lisp, but in practice I find it's just really hard to read down the road, especially other people's Lisp. The visual cues provided by the "ugliness" of other languages do help reading (I gave examples nearby). Lisp is kind of like new tract homes: they look all the same such that it's easy to get lost. An old neighborhood with funny bent mailboxes and a mish-mash of house and yard styles is just easier to remember.