On Sunday, November 6, 2016 at 9:54:19 PM UTC-6, Alan Thompson wrote: > > There was quite a discussion of this topic back in July if you'd like to > review it: https://goo.gl/Azy8Nf > > The semantic mismatch is unfortunate. > Alan >
It's not just a mismatch with not-any?, though. "any?" makes no sense as a name for a function that returns true no matter what is passed to it. That's not what "any" means in English. Alex Miller ended the discussion by stating that it was not up for debate. (So the rest of this post will affect nothing, and there are good reasons to stop reading.) My respect for Alex (and Rich) is very, very great, but I think this choice, and the decision to shut down discussion of it when spec is still alpha is, yeah, unfortunate. Not that it matters now. But alpha was the time to discuss it. Similar to points I've made before: There are lots of things I like about Clojure, and lots of reasons that I am happier using Clojure than Common Lisp. Here's one: Common Lisp sometimes uses a confusing hodgepodge of function names, sometimes with differently named functions that do similar things, with different argument orders and different semantics in other respects. I assume that this is because CL was defined by a committee, and in particular a committee that wanted to merge independently-developed dialects of Lisp. Clojure, by contrast, was not designed by committee, and was designed from the start to have an elegant system of functions and function names. Not perfect in this respect, but still beautiful. It makes Clojure easier to learn, easier to understand, and makes it easier to remember function names and semantics. So it bugs me when Clojure takes a step toward arbitrary quirkiness. "any?" wasn't the only option. I would have gone with something obvious like "always-true", or "yes", or even something possibly too-clever like "arg-or-not-arg?" or "or-not-this?" These last might be confusing, but not misleading, as "any?" is. (But none of that matters.) (There is an upside to quirkiness, however. if you program in CL for a bit, you get to experience the pride of your esoteric knowledge of the ins and outs of CL's functions.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
