From design patterns to category theory

Re:From design patterns to category theory by edem on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:43AM (#15407571)

How can you call lisp an inaccessible language? It has less syntax than anything else. It is as simple as a language gets.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by kryptiskt on Thursday October 05, 2017 @06:20AM (#15407988)

Brainfuck has even simpler syntax and is even more inaccessible. There's way more to languages than syntax.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by edem on Saturday October 07, 2017 @06:11AM (#15423156)

Brainfuck it unintuitive, but Lisp is. You can learn the lambda calculus in 10 minutes. You can'c tompare the two.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by hoorayimhelping on Thursday October 05, 2017 @07:22AM (#15408263)

How many stack overflow questions and answers are there for lisp(s)? How many for Java? How many applications on the web are written in a lisp? How many are written in Java (or Python or Ruby or PHP)?

There's a lot more to accessibility than how easy the syntax is to grok. This is just one simple and limited example.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by flavio81 on Friday October 06, 2017 @01:33PM (#15418589)

>How many stack overflow questions and answers are there for lisp

Yet there are a ton of books written about Lisp in all kinds of topics and applications. Not to mention really well-written tutorials like "Practical Common Lisp".

Plus, the documentation/reference of the language itself is comprehensive and well written, comparing favorably to the documentation for most programming languages out there.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by flavio81 on Friday October 06, 2017 @01:35PM (#15418612)

>How many applications on the web are written in a lisp?

You are using one right now: Hacker News is written on a Lisp: Arc.

Also, the first HTTP 1.1 compliant server and used by the W3C to debug the HTTP 1.1 reference implementation, was written in Common Lisp.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by 201709User on Thursday October 05, 2017 @06:30AM (#15408032)

It's better to have 50 keywords than 1000 nested brackets.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by empthought on Thursday October 05, 2017 @07:04AM (#15408196)

Personally I don't see the advantage of )}]]})} over ))))))).

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by kazinator on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:09PM (#15412213)

It's more time consuming to close )}]]})}. With ))) we just repeatedly type ))) until the cursor jumps to the target opening paren we are trying to close. With a mixture of different parens we have to interrupt what we are doing and determine the correct parens which will continue the closing sequence.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by flavio81 on Friday October 06, 2017 @01:38PM (#15418645)

>With ))) we just repeatedly type ))) until the cursor jumps to the target opening paren we are trying to close.

Exactly.

Or, the IDE can close all the parens for you: SLIME command "slime-close-all-parens-in-sexp", which you can map to whatever key combination you want.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by Udik on Thursday October 05, 2017 @08:05AM (#15408430)

I think there are people who value completeness- they enjoy working on systems with many rules tailored for specific use cases, and like accumulating knowledge about which rule is the correct one to apply in each situation; and there are people who value open-endedness- systems that have few simple rules that can be combined to obtain novel and unexpected results, even if these are not as optimized as they could be in a more complete system.

I picture the difference as that between a role playing game and chess: complex, domain-specific rules on one side, simple and abstract rules on the other.

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Re:From design patterns to category theory by edem on Saturday October 07, 2017 @06:12AM (#15423158)

Not really. You can't comment on this until you tried a lisp. I know that you haven't tried it because if you had you would have known about paredit and how it solves the paren problem.

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