Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > But Lisp's syntax is so unlike most written natural languages that that it > is a whole different story. Yes, the human brain is amazingly flexible, > and people can learn extremely complex syntax and grammars (especially if > they start young enough) so I'm not surprised that there are thousands, > maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands of Lisp developers who find the > language perfectly readable. > > But that isn't to say that the syntax of Lisp is for everybody. yeah, I think it is. Folks don't vary that much. If every Lisp programmer also reports parens disappearing at about thirty days, any given non-Lispnik can pretty much bet on the same experience. And since no one can produce a witness who worked fulltime on Lisp for thirty days and gave up on it because it was a great language but they could not handle the syntax, or a witness who stayed with Lisp because it is a great language even though to this day they have trouble reading the synatx... > Far from > it -- I'd be willing to bet that Lisp developers are a self-selected group > of far above average intelligence. I think the early adopter is distinguished not so much by greater intelligence as by restlessness and rebelliousness and a little lunacy. We lack the knack of happiness. Many of the stories on the RtL reveal folks who sought A Better Way after mastering other languages. And by Better Way, sorry, we mean "why do I have to forever worry about the damn paper tape on this Turing machine!". We do not really like programming, we like thinking about problems and using a computer to solve them. > That would explain why so many of them > seem to be so much more comfortable with higher-order functions than most > other people -- even intelligent people. > > (Looking back, I'm embarrassed about my first reaction to factory > functions all those years ago. Hiss hiss spit. But even with added > familiarity, there comes a time where one has to question the benefit of > sufficiently high-order functions. If you are writing a factory function > that returns factory functions that return factory functions that return > the functions that you needed in the first place, chances are you really > need to rethink your tactics.) > > If I'm right, then maybe Lisp is "better" in some absolute sense, *for > those who can use it*. For those who can't, it isn't just a matter of > (say) the syntax being hard to read because it is unfamiliar, but it > being objectively harder to use. > > An interesting study would be to track people's eyeballs as they read > code, ... I spend about 90% of my time thinking and writing code, and read it only to understand how something works or why it broke. And then I am looking at parentheses no more than you are looking at the lines of resolution on a TV when watching Baywatch. I am looking at a mechanism and how it works. > ...or look at how much oxygen their brain uses. Do Lisp coders do more > work to read Lisp than Python coders do to read Python? I suspect they do, > but successful Lisp coders don't notice. My suspicion goes the other way, and is based not on punctuation, rather on imperative vs functional. In Lisp every form returns a value, so I do not have all these local variables around that, in the strecth of an interesting function, take on a stream of values and transformations to finally come up with some result, meaning to understand code I have to jump back and forth thru the code to see the lineage of a value and figure out its net semantics. Too much like work. > Everybody else does, and > gravitate to languages which might not be "better" but are "good enough". No, they gravitated to a language that was closer to what they already knew, C or Java (which also mimicked C to pick up those users). Later charms of Python were a great community and library support. Lisp simply does not have the latter, one is forever rolling one's own bindings to C libs. > (If my post leads to any Lisp developer's already swollen head exploding > from pride, my job here is done *wink*) They can't get any bigger. :) ken -- Algebra: http://www.tilton-technology.com/LispNycAlgebra1.htm "Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd "I'll say I'm losing my grip, and it feels terrific." -- Smiling husband to scowling wife, New Yorker cartoon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
