Re:History of Lisp Parentheses (2019)
by distcs on Thursday February 02, 2023 @05:41AM
(#34624810)
> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters.
Really? Python relies much more on delimiters than Lisp? Python has all kinds of delimiters for subscripting, comparison, slicing, destructuring, etc. Each one of this adds a lot of syntactic overhead while teaching Python to beginners. Whether indentation makes it easy or more difficult to learn Python is debatable. Indentation definitely makes it easy to read but beginners are learning to write code.
> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary.
Can you point to some actual data or references instead of making one unfounded claim after another? Do beginners who have not been exposed to any programming language yet really find parentheses scary? Where can I see the data?
I have first hand experience in teaching both BASIC, Python and Lisp (actually, Scheme) to school children as their first programming language. Believe it or not, in my experience they found BASIC the easiest to learn, then Lisp and then Python. For first time learners Python has a lot of pitfalls (screwing up indentation even a little bit leads to errors that confuses students).
Really? Python relies much more on delimiters than Lisp? Python has all kinds of delimiters for subscripting, comparison, slicing, destructuring, etc. Each one of this adds a lot of syntactic overhead while teaching Python to beginners. Whether indentation makes it easy or more difficult to learn Python is debatable. Indentation definitely makes it easy to read but beginners are learning to write code.
> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary.
Can you point to some actual data or references instead of making one unfounded claim after another? Do beginners who have not been exposed to any programming language yet really find parentheses scary? Where can I see the data?
I have first hand experience in teaching both BASIC, Python and Lisp (actually, Scheme) to school children as their first programming language. Believe it or not, in my experience they found BASIC the easiest to learn, then Lisp and then Python. For first time learners Python has a lot of pitfalls (screwing up indentation even a little bit leads to errors that confuses students).