The Roots of Lisp (2001)

Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by lkschubert8 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:45AM (#22063953)

I think they are referring to the nested nature of lisp function calls.

    (second-fn (first-fn val))

I think that is really just personal preference/what you were taught as opposed to good or bad language design. But it really doesn't matter as one of the big benefits of lisp is it's ability to be metaprogrammed. That same example could be rewritten in clojure as

    (-> val first-fn second-fn)

thanks to macros and doesn't suffer from the right->left reading.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by coldtea on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:51AM (#22063986)

> I think they are referring to the nested nature of lisp function calls. (second-fn (first-fn val))

How's this different than:

  secondFn(firstFn(val))

other than the placement of parenthesis, the two cases read exactly the same, left to right.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by phyrex on Thursday January 16, 2020 @01:41PM (#22067492)

I'm on the side of lisp here, but in OOP you'd usually write something like

    val.firstFn().secondFn()

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by lkschubert8 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @08:35AM (#22064338)

I've seen a lot of breaking that out into the following in imperative languages.

    var intermediaryVal = firstFn(val);
    var result = secondFn(intermediaryVal);

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by slifin on Thursday January 16, 2020 @08:50AM (#22064448)

  (let [intermediary-val (first-fn val)
        result (second-fn intermediary-val)])

Or as one of the parents said

  (-> val first-fn second-fn)

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