8 ms·

Easier to parse, but it would be close to impossible for humans to edit the real-world pages. Try turning any bootstrap template with their 10+ nested levels of

by ivanhoe 12y ago

Easier to parse, but it would be close to impossible for humans to edit the real-world pages. Try turning any bootstrap template with their 10+ nested levels of tags into the syntax you propose, and then try moving things around in the editor, finding the right spot to append an element when all you see is something like )))))))), that would be crazy hard to do without errors. To make that work we would first need some kind of function syntax, so that deep nested blocks can be simplified.

sparkie 12y ago
Parent mentioned "specialized editor". What he meant was emacs + ParEdit, which alleviates these problems. With ParEdit, you don't navigate around and edit sequences of characters - you edit nodes in a tree - where each set of parens in the text represents a node and the individual identifiers are the leaves. It's awkward to use at first because you need to supress your usual text-editing habits, but the productivity gain once you're familiar with it is worth the training. Besides, Lisp has the tooling for collapsing deeply nested structures into flatter ones if you need to, because one can use nested defines inside a function and later just call by name if needed. It just means the stuff that would've been more deeply nested will be defined earlier than it's container. Most of the time this is usually what you want anyway, because you're going to be reusing a lot of the structure elsewhere in the document - DRY becomes a lot simpler.
- davidw 12y ago
  A lot of people get their start with HTML by just opening it up with .... whatever ... and fiddling with it. These people are not Lisp programmers, not by a long shot. HTML is nice in part because it's pretty easy and accessible for people who are not programmers by training.
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    Do you really think "<foo></foo>" is more accessible to a noob than "(foo...)"? It's not like HTML is painless to edit, either.
    - davidw 12y ago
      In a vacuum, they might be the same, although like someone else mentioned, with parens, you eventually get the dreaded ))))))) somewhere. It's not in a vacuum though: there are tons of tools and tutorials and colleagues and other things dealing with HTML as it is, and tons of people used to how it currently is.
      - andrewflnr 12y ago
        The original question, "how would sexprs make a better markup language", was in a vacuum. At least that's how I took it, and for good reason. A discussion whose pivotal argument is "well, that's how we do things now" is neither interesting nor (after the first few times your idealism is stomped on) is it illuminating.

by ivanhoe 12y ago

sparkie 12y ago

Parent mentioned "specialized editor". What he meant was emacs + ParEdit, which alleviates these problems. With ParEdit, you don't navigate around and edit sequences of characters - you edit nodes in a tree - where each set of parens in the text represents a node and the individual identifiers are the leaves. It's awkward to use at first because you need to supress your usual text-editing habits, but the productivity gain once you're familiar with it is worth the training. Besides, Lisp has the tooling for collapsing deeply nested structures into flatter ones if you need to, because one can use nested defines inside a function and later just call by name if needed. It just means the stuff that would've been more deeply nested will be defined earlier than it's container. Most of the time this is usually what you want anyway, because you're going to be reusing a lot of the structure elsewhere in the document - DRY becomes a lot simpler.

davidw 12y ago
A lot of people get their start with HTML by just opening it up with .... whatever ... and fiddling with it. These people are not Lisp programmers, not by a long shot. HTML is nice in part because it's pretty easy and accessible for people who are not programmers by training.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  Do you really think "<foo></foo>" is more accessible to a noob than "(foo...)"? It's not like HTML is painless to edit, either.
  - davidw 12y ago
    In a vacuum, they might be the same, although like someone else mentioned, with parens, you eventually get the dreaded ))))))) somewhere. It's not in a vacuum though: there are tons of tools and tutorials and colleagues and other things dealing with HTML as it is, and tons of people used to how it currently is.
    - andrewflnr 12y ago
      The original question, "how would sexprs make a better markup language", was in a vacuum. At least that's how I took it, and for good reason. A discussion whose pivotal argument is "well, that's how we do things now" is neither interesting nor (after the first few times your idealism is stomped on) is it illuminating.