On Thursday 06 May 2010 16:32:50, Limestraël wrote:
^^ That's an interesting debate: How do you imagine the future programming languages? But not today's topic. It's strange that, since Lisp is still used now, especially for teaching purposes, and since everybody complains about parenthesises, nobody developed a Lisp-like just based on indentation...
Readable Lisp. Now, that could be an interesting language :)
To my mind, I think that as long as you lay out well your code, Lisp is quite readable. I don't see why the parenthesises would make it harder to learn.
It's idiosyncratic. I just don't manage to see through them. If you don't get distracted by the parentheses, good for you.
Daniel, prior to learn Haskell, did you know other functional languages?
No. Just some faint memories of Pascal from twenty years before and a bit of Java. Haskell just matched the natural way of thinking pretty closely. It might have something to do with the fact that I studied mathematics.
Cause I didn't, and let me tell you that the functional way of coding wasn't obvious while beginning (now I can't do without), especially the whole monad thing. Problem: Haskell without monads (or structures even more unusual, like Arrows) is no longer Haskell (can be subject to debate, too), so you have to get the point if you want to use properly the language. Or else you stuck to quicksort-like algorithms which show the beauty of the language, but not its power.
2010/5/6 Pierre-Etienne Meunier
Fifty years ago someone came up with this idea of lisp and parentheses. By now in year 2010, I have never heard of any programmer who never made jokes about it.
I don't remember ever making a joke about it. But I'm not a programmer, so I'm not a counterexample.
... good luck limestraël ;-)
Seconded.