On 15/02/10 23:33, Ben Schmidt wrote:
[...]
Vim is essentially an imperative procedural language. Lisp is
essentially a functional language. Most people find imperative languages
easier to understand because they're a bit more like recipes and a bit
less like Mathematics! Some people find the reverse, though.
Lisp is certainly more elegant than Vimscript, which is just a mess,
with as many exceptions as rules, and different escaping mechanisms
needed every few lines. If you want to do serious programming, Lisp is
the way to go. If you want a quick hack, Vimscript is probably easier.
Ben.
You know, even in math there are a lot of recipes. Addition,
subtraction, multiplication, long division and rule-of-three I learnt in
grade school; in high school I learnt (in the very first year; my
classmates were aged 12) how to solve a linear problem by algebra; later
came (I don't remember in what sequence) how to compute a derivative, a
determinant, solve linear systems with determinants, solve a quadratic
equation, and much more (also how to compute a square root, but that
wasn't a required subject; I learnt it from the arithmetics book without
even telling the teacher, because it was my kind of fun). All of these
are recipes; even in college math there were a lot of recipes, but I
dropped out of college before graduating (that was in 1969), and became
an analyst-programmer, where I started to _write_ recipes (in the form
of flow charts first, and then translating these flow charts into
program language). The few subjects where there were no recipes were
much harder: I'll mention how to prove a theorem, or how to make a
construction with ruler and compasses (in high school geometry) or how
to solve differential equations (in college calculus): there you had to
guess, then check, proceeding by trial-and-error until -- if you were
lucky -- your guess proved right.
Lisp looks like Volapük to me; Vimscript I can (more or less)
understand. Of course, the Blob argument invalidates this line of
reasoning, letting it even appear that "therefore" (which I challenge as
"the argument of obscurity") Lisp would be "more powerful" than
vimscript. What is "serious" programming anyway? AFAICT, the collection
of Vim plugins run the whole gamut from the most serious to the most
fun; but of course, for heavy number-crunching, vimscript has the same
performance liabilities as most interpreted languages -- maybe not
really all of them: so perhaps I could say that for serious programming,
FORTH is the way to go? ;-)
And BTW, (in answer to another post) how to compute an arbitrary sum (of
zero or more terms)? IIRC (it was several decades ago):
0
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
PRINT
----> 10
Simple isn't it? (And the 0 can be left out if you also omit the first
+) By the time you've finished entering the data, you have the result. :-P
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Iles's Law:
There is always an easier way to do it. When looking directly
at the easy way, especially for long periods, you will not see it.
Neither will Iles.
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