4 ms·

I wonder what makes the difference in person's perception of code. I think I have a good idea of what the pg's code fragment does at a first grance. (I do kno

by shiro 19y ago

I wonder what makes the difference in person's perception of code. I think I have a good idea of what the pg's code fragment does at a first grance. (I do know what [ _ ] means in Arc, though; pg mentioned it somewhere.) I doubt it's the density that's the problem. I also doubt macros are. It's more like whether you recognize "the way" in which you're supposed to write, in the given language. Any language, verbose or terse, is indecipherable until you get familiar with the way even you know the syntax and semantics of the language.

sridharvembu 19y ago
Granted. To be fair to Paul, I got about 60% of it based on a (rusty) idea of lisp. The _ got me (should've thought of Perl)... but now it is clear. My broader point still holds though - there is a maximal density ... And the reason I commented on it was that in posting that code fragment, the message was that it would be "kind of obvious" to any reasonably competent programmers how macros really help. I agree macros really do help, so no quarrel there. In this case, we understand the "application" perfectly, and then we get to see the code. It still got (some of us) stumped, and (some of us again) actually know about macros and are moderately familiar with Lisp idioms. That is why I asked if density can go too far. Compare that to something like LINQ, which I am coincidentally studying. It is a DSL for querying object collections (a similar use case to the code here). With no special background, you can go in, read code, and get a reasonable idea of what is going on. LINQ actually lets you get rid of a lot of code (something I agree with in general), so it lives much higher on the density scale than a typical blub.
- shiro 19y ago
  I see your point. So the question is actually whether a language designer can only care his "types"---those who have similar thinking habit and thus has less difficulty to understand the code---or should target at larger audiences. Ultimately that's the choice of the designer; not all languages need to address to the broad range of programmers.
- pchristensen 19y ago
  I don't think the point was that everyone was supposed to be able to understand every detail of the code. I think he was showing that by using a bunch of macros, he could add a new command to the web server that would create a new type of page with a very small amount of code. How would the code look to create the top color page if it was written in another language? Less code = faster development, easier maintenance, fewer bugs

by shiro 19y ago

sridharvembu 19y ago

Granted. To be fair to Paul, I got about 60% of it based on a (rusty) idea of lisp. The _ got me (should've thought of Perl)... but now it is clear. My broader point still holds though - there is a maximal density ... And the reason I commented on it was that in posting that code fragment, the message was that it would be "kind of obvious" to any reasonably competent programmers how macros really help. I agree macros really do help, so no quarrel there. In this case, we understand the "application" perfectly, and then we get to see the code. It still got (some of us) stumped, and (some of us again) actually know about macros and are moderately familiar with Lisp idioms. That is why I asked if density can go too far. Compare that to something like LINQ, which I am coincidentally studying. It is a DSL for querying object collections (a similar use case to the code here). With no special background, you can go in, read code, and get a reasonable idea of what is going on. LINQ actually lets you get rid of a lot of code (something I agree with in general), so it lives much higher on the density scale than a typical blub.

shiro 19y ago
I see your point. So the question is actually whether a language designer can only care his "types"---those who have similar thinking habit and thus has less difficulty to understand the code---or should target at larger audiences. Ultimately that's the choice of the designer; not all languages need to address to the broad range of programmers.
pchristensen 19y ago
I don't think the point was that everyone was supposed to be able to understand every detail of the code. I think he was showing that by using a bunch of macros, he could add a new command to the web server that would create a new type of page with a very small amount of code. How would the code look to create the top color page if it was written in another language? Less code = faster development, easier maintenance, fewer bugs