Re: socially challenged???!!??

On Jul 2, 4:32 pm, Rainer Joswig <jos...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Sorry, but your remarks are unfriendly and I will
killfile you.

Well, that's too bad because I wasn't singly you out personally and
have found many of your comments useful and interesting and it's a
shame you won't know I feel that way that because you won't be reading
this.

For anyone still reading, in other reddit comments I mention that the
reason for c.l.l.'s quick reaction of labeling a comment a troll is
due to the large number of real trolls that come through this group.
I think because of that there is sometimes an over reaction of
declaring someone a troll when they have a legitimate criticism of
Lisp or an honest question that unfortunately resembles a question or
comment that was a troll in the past.

Beyond that, there seems to be a paranoia about adding anything in any
way to "Lisp". Notice the quotation marks, because I don't care if
the existing Common Lisp standard ever officially changes, but I think
"Lisp" could benefit from more defacto-standardization of picking some
core functionality and convincing the various Lisp implementors to
bundle it through social pressure and pitching in to help.

Elsewhere in the same comments thread as my offending remark, someone
asks why Lisp has no literal syntax for hash tables. I pointed out
that Lisp syntax has literals for anything tree like, and that Lisp
prefers consistency of syntax (enabling powerful macros, etc.) instead
of special case syntaxes like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

Well, that did make me curious why Common Lisp does not have a reader
syntax for hash tables. In the process, I discovered hash tables are
one of the few things that lack a reader syntax (numbers, strings,
lists, vectors, structs all covered; did I miss any?). Investigating
more, I found a long, involved c.l.l. thread from 1999 discussing this
very issue. The conversation revolved around "what about the edge
cases?" You might not be able to re-establish notions of identity
when you read your hash table back in, thus breaking semantics.

Well, so what? It's an edge case. Document the limitations somewhere
and move on. (Which several people advocated.)

But there is no one who can just say "let's just make a decision and
move on" for Lisp. No Matz, Guido, Larry, or Stroustrup. The spec is
great. But the fear of establishing any kind of consensus for
anything not in the spec is a shortcoming of the Lisp community, in my
opinion.

My criticism goes to Common Lisp culture and community as a whole, not
to any one individual. It is good to have individuals in the
community that say "wait a sec, what about..." before blindly pushing
forward with a new idea. But when those sentiments overwhelm the
community as a whole and change, thus progress, becomes impossible, I
consider that a broken culture.

So please don't think I'm picking out individuals here as the problem
with Lisp. But I do think the sum of Lisp culture is holding Lisp
back from its full potential at this junction.

-jimbo

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Cons cell archaic!?
    ... How would the implementation of a Lisp without a using cons look like? ... the irregularity in its often cited regular syntax. ... Lisp at core is based on functional programing on lists. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Parsing s-expression trees
    ... expressions --> lisp. ... the irregularity in its often cited regular syntax. ... programers can pretty much tell what piece of source code ... Lisp relies on a regular nested syntax. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Xah on Lisp
    ... Lisp relies on a regular nested syntax. ... Whether the syntax "irregularities" due to the five mentioned characters ... You want me to define the power of a computer language? ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Any macro for inserting math "normally"
    ... I do not disagree LISP might be doing the wrong thing, ... I'm not saying I wouldn't look at the result. ... In no part I am stating that one would abandon the prefix syntax by an ... community and need the help of the outsiders. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Whats the best language to learn...
    ... on processors designed to run Lisp and Lisp OSes. ... sence that the language make effective use of them. ... No other programming language can do what lisp can do. ... is exactly because of its syntax. ...
    (comp.programming)