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> come with the baggage of foreign looking syntax Maybe they're right about the syntax too though? :)
by rapind 1y ago
> come with the baggage of foreign looking syntax
Maybe they're right about the syntax too though? :)
- kragen 1y agoWhich one, Erlang, Lisp, or ML?
- nickpeterson 1y agoHonestly I find ML derived languages the most pleasant to look at.
- kragen 11mo agoI prefer Piet, but it has some real drawbacks when it comes to readability: https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html
- tmtvl 1y agoLisp syntax is objectively superior because you can write a predicate like thus: (< lower-bound x-coordinate upper-bound) Instead of having to do the awful ampersand dance.
- kragen 11mo agoIn Python or Icon (or Unicon) that's lower_bound < x_coordinate < upper_bound except that usually you want lower_bound <= x_coordinate < upper_bound which is also legal. In Python this is a magical special case, but in Icon/Unicon it falls out somewhat naturally from the language semantics; comparisons don't return Boolean values, but rather fail (returning no value) or succeed (returning a usually unused value which is chosen to be, IIRC, the right-hand operand). And in SQL you have `x-coordinate` between `lower-bound` - 1 and `upper-bound` + 1 which is obviously the best possible syntax.
- rapind 11mo agoML superfan here. I don’t mind lisp simplicity either. Erlang is too alien for me, but maybe once I was used to it.
- impossiblefork 11mo agoIf you start programming in it though, syntax only matters during the first day. Familiarity comes very fast, and if you do five programming exercises, maybe one a day, 'implement a hash map', 'make a small game', etc. you will have no problems whatsoever once the week is done. If you have a course where one day you're supposed to do Haskell and another Erlang, and another LISP, and another Prolog, and there's only one exercise in each language, then you're obviously going to have to waste a lot of time on syntax, but that's never a situation you encounter while actually programming.
- rapind 11mo agoI disagree, at least for my own case. I greatly prefer reading ML code than C style syntax.
- runevault 11mo agoEh, I'd say it depends. I write way more algol-derived language code than ML, yet piped operations being an option over either constant dot operators where every function returns the answer or itself depending on the context or inside out code is beautiful in a way that I've never felt about my C#/C++/etc code. And even Lisp can do that style with arrow macros that exist in at least CL and Clojure (dunno about Racket/other schemes).
- kragen 11mo agoThis is far from true in my experience. I'm no Lisp hater (I wrote a self-compiling compiler in Scheme) but different syntaxes have dramatically different degrees of familiarity, like Latin letters and Cyrillic. How long do you think it would take you to learn to read phonetically in Cyrillic as fast as you do in the Latin script? It takes the humans months or years, if they ever arrive. But, also, some notations are more usable than others, even for experts, just as with other kinds of user interfaces. Flat is better than nested, simple is better than complex, complex is better than complicated, Perl and MUMPS are unnecessarily error-prone, etc.