It's a mistake to ignore the customer [LWN.net]

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 11:39 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146)
In reply to: It's a mistake to ignore the customer by HelloWorld
Parent article: GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

The solution to that isn't dumbing down the language but firing people who don't have half a clue.

Scheme is the ultimately dumbed-down language for the computer, to the degree that it does not require a parser for interpreting, just an expression reader and an evaluator.

It is similarly dumbed-down to the human reader as commerce/Pidgin English is, meaning that it takes practice and control to consistently dumb down in the right manner. The purpose is having a common language for talking about programs shared between human and computer.

Using infix in Scheme is like Yodish Pidgin English. Sort of defeats the original purpose of human and computer sharing a language for talking about code rather than humans expressing themselves to one another.

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It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 11:55 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

What a wonderful instance of "Humans can do the work, so machines have time to think."

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 17:26 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> Scheme is the ultimately dumbed-down language for the computer,
No, it's not. As you were told multiple times by now, Scheme already has syntactic sugar for multiple constructs. 'x is (quote x), and (quote x) is (quote . (x . ())).

> Using infix in Scheme is like Yodish Pidgin English. Sort of defeats the original purpose of human and computer sharing a language for talking about code rather than humans expressing themselves to one another.
No, it doesn't. What makes Lisp Lisp is the ability to easily represent a program in the language's primary data structure and manipulate it. Infix syntax doesn't change that, it just makes things more readable. Again, you were told this multiple times, so I don't even know why I repeat it again. It's really a waste of time to argue with a stick-in-the-mud like you.

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 18:38 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Not quite. The problem, in a sense, is that the structure chosen for representing program makes sense for optimizing interpreter a bit, at the cost of being very unnatural. Subtrees are not subexpressions. Sure, that way you avoid digging in to find the node where you'll be doing reduction, but that doesn't come for free. As the matter of fact (and you damn well know that, seeing that you seem to be familiar with e.g. Haskell), the things can be done the other way round - with APPLY being the fundamental primitive and CONS expressed via it. The same "easily represent program in the language's primary data structure" thing holds for a lot more than just LISP, e.g. when the primary data structure *is* partially evaluated expression. That's not what makes LISP LISP; neither is the syntax, of course.