3 ms·

And to me the parsing aspect of lisp is key. It means the language won't resort to external tooling to improve. Most of the programming world defaults to increa

And to me the parsing aspect of lisp is key. It means the language won't resort to external tooling to improve. Most of the programming world defaults to increasing the number of things you need in order to do more, while lispers seemed to like absorption of concepts as the main strategy (see Steele: growing a language talk IIRC).

PaulHoule 3y ago
And you wind up overloading a small number of syntax constructions for an endlessly expanding number of uses and soon you're in a twisty maze of parenthesis that all look alike. Look at how HP calculators got trashed by TI. I'd grant that parser generators still suck, people still act like you're crazy when you say you want to be able to write one grammar and automatically generate not just a parser but an unparser. (I could do amazing stuff with Sphinx if only it supported RST output as well as schemaless RST.) CASE tools in the 1990 could parse code, let you edit it in a GUI, and make a clean edit to the code (not mess up comments, whitespace, and the ordering of things which is only significant to your version control tools) like a professional programmer would. That's still like something that fell off a UFO. You should totally be able to compose two grammars. I ought to be able to stick a SQL query right into the middle of program in Java or any other language and have it parsed to an AST. If parser generators were sane I could add unless(X) { Y } to a language like Java and add a method that rewrites it to if(!X) { Y } and it shouldn't be more than 50 lines of code including imports and ceremony, just a patch to the grammar (AST objects ought to be code generated from the grammar) a simple rewriting function and telling the system where to find the grammar patch and the new function. Parsing Expression Grammars are a step in the right direction but for a PEG parser to be really revolutionary it needs a few features I've yet to see in one, in particular there has to be some easy way to specify operator precedence either numerically or with a set of statements like Closer(*,+) I am mostly disappointed w/ the PEG parser in Python because it falls short of revolutionary promises but you always get "fooled again" with parsing because people care about how fast their compilers are to the exclusion of almost everything else.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  The twisty maze of parens I never understand. (And the fact that TI won is probably, imho, only vaguely to syntax, kids barely use calcs anyway, and I'd argue that if you'd show them RPL immense programming surface, lists, vectors, lambdas, they'd use it more than the usual fix function graphing calc) I never had a chance to see proper CASE tools, my education started in 2000.. java/uml took the light and the few environments I saw were very very subpar (post IBM, eclipse based, rational suite). The grammar composition is still a big open problem, I think Lawrence Tratt tried to attack it (maybe this https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/diekmann_tratt__parsing_composed_grammars_with_language_boxes.pdf https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/diekmann_tratt__parsing_compos... ?) but concluded it was still fragile/difficult.
- bsder 3y ago
  > Look at how HP calculators got trashed by TI. That had almost nothing to do with syntax and almost everything due to lobbying. HP was not an "approved" calculator for all manner of standardized tests while really shitty TI ones were. HP calculators were everywhere in my engineering department from 1988 to 1992 (the HP-28S and then the HP-48SX went through them like wildfire).
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    And they're still both amazing piece of hardware and software and very much prized by people today. It falls in a totally different space of immense possibilities.
    - bsder 3y ago
      My point is that they were objectively better than anything TI was producing in the calculator space for a very long time--the evidence is that engineering students at a state school were forking over what were non-trivial amounts of money at the time for them. The problem was that places like the College Board allowed calculators in 1994. That meant that an "approved" list of calculators appeared and for a long time the HP programmable calculators were considered "too powerful" and disallowed. That "approved" list propagated to other things that used calculators in official capacities. That absolutely killed HP as the volume all went to TI since everybody bought TI calculators and nobody was going to then spend on an HP calculator that might not be allowed on your test. By contrast, look at business and finance majors where lobbying didn't create an "approved" list--you will pry an HP-12B from their cold, dead hands.

PaulHoule 3y ago

And you wind up overloading a small number of syntax constructions for an endlessly expanding number of uses and soon you're in a twisty maze of parenthesis that all look alike. Look at how HP calculators got trashed by TI. I'd grant that parser generators still suck, people still act like you're crazy when you say you want to be able to write one grammar and automatically generate not just a parser but an unparser. (I could do amazing stuff with Sphinx if only it supported RST output as well as schemaless RST.) CASE tools in the 1990 could parse code, let you edit it in a GUI, and make a clean edit to the code (not mess up comments, whitespace, and the ordering of things which is only significant to your version control tools) like a professional programmer would. That's still like something that fell off a UFO. You should totally be able to compose two grammars. I ought to be able to stick a SQL query right into the middle of program in Java or any other language and have it parsed to an AST. If parser generators were sane I could add unless(X) { Y } to a language like Java and add a method that rewrites it to if(!X) { Y } and it shouldn't be more than 50 lines of code including imports and ceremony, just a patch to the grammar (AST objects ought to be code generated from the grammar) a simple rewriting function and telling the system where to find the grammar patch and the new function. Parsing Expression Grammars are a step in the right direction but for a PEG parser to be really revolutionary it needs a few features I've yet to see in one, in particular there has to be some easy way to specify operator precedence either numerically or with a set of statements like Closer(*,+) I am mostly disappointed w/ the PEG parser in Python because it falls short of revolutionary promises but you always get "fooled again" with parsing because people care about how fast their compilers are to the exclusion of almost everything else.

agumonkey 3y ago
The twisty maze of parens I never understand. (And the fact that TI won is probably, imho, only vaguely to syntax, kids barely use calcs anyway, and I'd argue that if you'd show them RPL immense programming surface, lists, vectors, lambdas, they'd use it more than the usual fix function graphing calc) I never had a chance to see proper CASE tools, my education started in 2000.. java/uml took the light and the few environments I saw were very very subpar (post IBM, eclipse based, rational suite). The grammar composition is still a big open problem, I think Lawrence Tratt tried to attack it (maybe this https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/diekmann_tratt__parsing_composed_grammars_with_language_boxes.pdf https://soft-dev.org/pubs/pdf/diekmann_tratt__parsing_compos... ?) but concluded it was still fragile/difficult.
bsder 3y ago
> Look at how HP calculators got trashed by TI. That had almost nothing to do with syntax and almost everything due to lobbying. HP was not an "approved" calculator for all manner of standardized tests while really shitty TI ones were. HP calculators were everywhere in my engineering department from 1988 to 1992 (the HP-28S and then the HP-48SX went through them like wildfire).
- agumonkey 3y ago
  And they're still both amazing piece of hardware and software and very much prized by people today. It falls in a totally different space of immense possibilities.
  - bsder 3y ago
    My point is that they were objectively better than anything TI was producing in the calculator space for a very long time--the evidence is that engineering students at a state school were forking over what were non-trivial amounts of money at the time for them. The problem was that places like the College Board allowed calculators in 1994. That meant that an "approved" list of calculators appeared and for a long time the HP programmable calculators were considered "too powerful" and disallowed. That "approved" list propagated to other things that used calculators in official capacities. That absolutely killed HP as the volume all went to TI since everybody bought TI calculators and nobody was going to then spend on an HP calculator that might not be allowed on your test. By contrast, look at business and finance majors where lobbying didn't create an "approved" list--you will pry an HP-12B from their cold, dead hands.