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A comment on Lisp in Space. Parent comment

Re:Lisp in Space by lisper on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @06:30PM (#31254422)
Well, not quite. Some languages are by design good impedance matches to brains that don't know very much. BASIC is the canonical example. It's really easy to learn, which makes it attractive to beginners, but it has some pretty serious limitations that you only become aware of after discharging a certain amount of ignorance. IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages.

To me, Lisp makes every other language I know feel like BASIC in the sense that the distinguishing features of the language feel to me like they are designed to appeal to ignorance rather than to empower.

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Re:Lisp in Space by dwohnitmok on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @07:42PM (#31255046)
> IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages.

"IMHO" and "objectively" are in fairly stark opposition.

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Re:Lisp in Space by lisper on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @07:54PM (#31255157)
Not really. All quality metrics are subjective. But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it. For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily. If your goal is something else, like challenging yourself to overcome adversity, then Brainfuck might be objectively better than C.
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Re:Lisp in Space by dwohnitmok on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @11:30PM (#31256436)
> But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it.

I agree, but the scope of your assessments will be very limited, and also you end up writing tautologies (if your objective quality metric is A, then you've redefined "better" to mean exactly A). In particular, the scope of your assessments will be far more limited than the example you give (words such as "easy," "simple," etc. are unlikely to enter the statement without some rigorous definition, but therefore also highly restrictive, underlying it).

> For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily.

I would not take a bet, that if you presented Brainfuck and C to all > 7 billion living humans, there would not be at least one person who found it easier to write software in Brainfuck than in C. Certainly I could imagine a hypothetical human for which it would not be true.

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