Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?

David Steuber wrote:
Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"William James" <w_a_x_man@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
Ruby was derived from Lisp, according to its creator.

Yes, there's a whole cottage industry of sub-optimal programming
language design developed by lisp illuminati.

Smalltalk (and all the OO wave) was started by Alan Kay who
programmed in Lisp. Java was created by James Gosling, well known
lisp programmer. Ruby was overtly "derived" from Lisp. etc.


Lisp is such a powerful tool, we cannot let them the masses use it!
We'd lose our competitive advantage!

I think the reason languages like Ruby are developed is to avoid the
parens. Yes, I'm being serious. What turns people off of Lisp more
than anything else does seem to be the parens.

Since most lisp developers use indentation to make code readable
anyway, would it be possible to combine parens and indentation to
produce a cleaner syntax that can be as easily parsed by the lisp
compiler/interpreter? The readability of such code would increase a lot
(at least for a beginner like me).

I must say, that although editors can add trailing parens to make
writing code easier, they cannot make the code easily readable by the
same token. And as a lisp beginner, I always tend to reference count
the end parens to find the matching begin parens of the expression area
within the parens.

I know Vim and Emacs can show matching begin (or end) paren when the
cursor is on the corresponding end (or begin) paren. But my cursor is
not always on the end or begin paren, when I read code.

Is there an option to highlight the whole expression demarcated by
parens? Like show the current expression region with a slightly bluish
tint background? (Emacs has something for showing the current mark
region in a different color M-x transient-mark-mode)

Hey maybe if there is such an option then, can it be taken one more
step ahead by showing the nested expressions by different shades of
bluish tint? And if your code is nested too deep, then the innermost
paren is a dark blue background !

I have heard of an advanced Lisp editor written in CLIM called <a
href="http://www.cliki.net/Climacs";>climancs</a>. Can climacs do the
nested expression shade thing?


I would call BS, but what turned me off of python was the whitespace.

I thought Matz was happy to steal good ideas from anywhere they were
to be found and that Ruby was more of a Smalltalk rip-off.

--
The lithobraker. Zero distance stops at any speed.
This post uses 100% post consumer electrons and 100% virgin photons.

.

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