Stop!

6 Responses to Stop!

1. Xah Lee says:

   2012-10-03 at 12:59 pm

   if people want to do that, a better way is at the editor level. Lisp syntax is such that it can be trivially auto-formatted. So, the editor can render it with indentation, or transform indentation to nested paren on the fly.

   when indentation is worked into the semantics (such as python, and now fashionable in YAML, Haskell, CoffeeScript, etc.), the language ceases the ability to auto format/render in anyway. It’s like hard-coded, ascii-art.

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2. Xah Lee says:

   2012-10-03 at 1:06 pm

   i think this idea is perennial. Back 10 years ago, i read such proposals or projects on comp.lang.lisp about every few years. Then later, i learned, such project went back to 1973 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGOL

   or even the original lisp, as M-Expression.

   though, to me, this indicates that pure nested paren is indeed a problem, as apparently not smart people constantly try to revive the idea.

   my fav example that works is Mathematica, where the syntax is pure nested form f[...], even more pure than lisp, yet it has a layer on top to allow such things as 3+4, etc.

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   • Xah Lee says:

     2012-10-03 at 1:08 pm

     not smart -> smart.

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   • jcs says:

     2012-10-03 at 1:21 pm

     This same pathology appears in many languages. As soon as people learn a new language they look around for ways to make it look like their old language. N00bs are always trying to get rid of parentheses in Lisp. After the 10th project you run across it gets old. The parentheses are there for a reason; Lispers like them; please leave them the hell alone.

     I remember years ago people coming to C from Pascal would use C macros to make the language look like Pascal. Guess what? The C experts didn’t approve of that anymore than the Lispers approve of people trying to make Lisp look like Python.

     Sadly, not even smart people are immune. Take a look at the source code for the original Bourne shell sometime.

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3. Gareth says:

   2012-10-03 at 2:13 pm

   While I completely agree with you about the sheer pointlessness of it all, I’m not sure how someone else choosing to do this affects you, and therefore I don’t understand why you care at all.

   (Unless they’re doing it in your codebase, in which case you are permitted – nay, morally obliged – to bonk them with their own keyboards and take away their { and } keys.

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   • jcs says:

     2012-10-03 at 2:30 pm

     Well, you’re right, of course, I shouldn’t care but here’s a thought experiment. I live in Florida. Suppose I came up to Canada and said, “You know, you guys don’t build your houses correctly here. The way we do it in Florida is…” If I did it once you would probably think something along the lines of, “What a dweeb! The moron doesn’t understand that the weather’s colder here.” and then forget about me. But what if I kept coming back and saying the same thing?

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