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Although the SICP is an awful book, the thing in section 1.1.1 that OP refers to where it presents formatting an expression: (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4)
by kazinator 2y ago
Although the SICP is an awful book, the thing in section 1.1.1 that OP refers to where it presents formatting an expression:
(+ (* 3
(+ (* 2 4)
(+ 3 5)))
(+ (- 10 7)
6))
is a decent point.
I mean, how could they present this differently? Pretty much any Lisp book should explain this stuff the same way. Look, we have these parentheses and that's what the machine cares about, but we split across and indent like this.
If someone finds that reformatting to be incomprehensible and unreadable, virtually no different from the original one liner, they may have some cognitive issue (a form of dyslexia or something like it). Likely they will struggle with programming in any language.
I don't suspect it's "cognitively typical" not to find the visual structure of the above formatting to be obviously helpful.
- lproven 2y agoI disagree. I was fine with Pascal, Fortran, minimally competent in C, and happy in half a dozen dialects of BASIC, which remains my preferred language.
- kazinator 2y agoI don't know, man. If a big truck is hurtling towards me, I'd prefer that the person behind the wheel not have the cognitive impairment that prevents them from being able to grok the visual structure of: (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) It's just very basic recognition of shapes suggested by incomplete contours.
- lispm 2y agoPascal, Fortran, C, ... All these languages use prefix notation for function calls. Fortran: min(size(b), size(a)) Lisp: (min (size b) (size a))