On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 10:16:50AM +0000, Andy Wardley wrote: > On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 12:55:56PM -0800, Rich Morin wrote: > > I'm not a Lisp enthusiast, by and large, but I think he makes some > > interesting observations on language design. Take a look if you're > > feeling adventurous... > > I can't help feeling slightly deflated. Given the chance to re-design > Lisp from scratch, the tasks on the top of my TODO list to address would > be: > > * getting rid of some/all those damn parenthesis > * renaming cons/car/cdr to something meaningful > > Alas, these are about the only parts he's not changing. He promises that > Arc will have a syntax one day, but there isn't one yet.
These slides are over a year old. There hasn't been much of Arc since Paul Graham's early musings on it. But one of the things he did do was rename lambda to fn. This is proof that the holy grails can be tossed out of the window. The problem with cons/car/cdr is that they're fundemental operations. Graham *has* learned from perl, and is receptive to the idea that fundemental operators should be huffman encoded (lambda -> fn). It would be easy to simply rename car/cdr to first/rest, but that loses the huffman nature of car/cdr. Austin mentioned that the syntax has eliminated the need for some of the parens, so that's a start. Perhaps a real syntax can follow. :-) > The other comments that caught my eye were that Arc is designed for > Good Programmers[tm] and that it was particularly targetted at developing > web applications. Alas, my experience seems to suggest that most of > the people writing web applications are monkeys who would rather have > something designed for Bad Programmers, like PHP. "Good Programmers [tm]" has been a theme of Graham's work. Figure that less than 10% of programmers make this cut. Lisp hackers like to assert that good programmers eventually migrate to Lisp or something lisp-like (er, functional). Count up all of the Lisp/Scheme/ML/Haskell programmers you know relative to the total number of programmers, and that's the percentage of web programmers he's targeting. The fact that a good many web programmers want ASP/PHP doesn't really have an impact on what he's trying to do. A bigger problem is that employers demand large numbers of these folks to do the job that someone Good [tm] could do in a day. Alone. While reading email. Z.
