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The irony of this is that many programmers treat continuations as some ivory-tower Lisp nonsense that seems unapproachable and inscrutable, and then they go to
by beering 13y ago
The irony of this is that many programmers treat continuations as some ivory-tower Lisp nonsense that seems unapproachable and inscrutable, and then they go to work and try to figure out how to get their node.js callbacks to work properly with their node.js promises library.
"I don't have time to learn about PL theory! I'm too busy reinventing how to implement basic control flow and concurrency in a bad-ass rock-star programming environment!"
Maybe when Prometheus brings generator expressions down to us mere mortal node.js programmers, then we can express how to do two things in sequence!
- ufo 13y agoGenerator expressions also have the advantage of being single-shot. Its one less thing to worry about when coding.
- acjohnson55 13y agoMaybe part of the problem is that continuations are rarely explained in the same clarity as a callback, a generator, or a promise. Perhaps the article will clarify for me, but even though I'm pretty sure I understand the concept, I'm not I truly understand what using continuations looks like in a Lisp right now.
- tel 13y agoIt really takes a significant shift to start "thinking in continuations". For one, in any sequentially written language it's easy to forget that flow control can be a first-class citizen. At least some part of what makes concurrency hard is that you can no longer survive without thinking about what sequentiality really means, so it's no surprise that when Node throws programmers deep into the churn on concurrency then they'll start to get an eye for continuations.