Re: Do people dislike parentheses or the conceptual mismatch with trees?

Ville Oikarinen <ville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

(It's surprising how much I need to say "I haven't said that" and "Yes,
that's what I have been saying" in this thread. Is it so difficult to stay
cool when somebody is brave and foolish enough to say that some part of
lisp is not quite perfect in some context?)

Your wording suggests that people have not stayed cool, yet I think they have.

I don't put much stock in your observation not because there isn't a reason
that some might dislike it for this reason. I'm sure there is.

If you go back and re-read Alan's message to which you're replying, it
contained some lucid points about how language works, in particular
that there are several meanings to wordings and you're using some wording
that is confusing on its face.

I don't have time to do a lot of detail this morning, so I'll just cite a
quick example for you to ponder. In your initial post, you write
"Could this be the reason why people dislike s-expressions".

I would hardly think your post noteworthy if you'd used the word "a"
instead of "the". There are many reasons people who choose to dislike
Lisp feel as they do. This could be one of them. But the entire
meaning of your statement changes when you use the word "the" because
it asks the question "the dominant reason". It presupposes that the
reasons to dislike a language are somehow canonical and convergent,
and that we should be searching for a single, unified, all-explanatory
thing.

The truth is that there are many things people do and don't like Lisp and
I don't see anyone denying the statement "There exists an x such that
x dislikes lisp because of <your reason>." Nor even "a number of x's".

The dominant reason why I don't think what you're saying is true of
most people is that I frankly don't think most people use trees. They
study them in school, but in my career I've not seen that to be the
dominant data structure, ESPECIALLY in languages like C/C++/etc. which
have had had measurably more programmer seats. Trees aren't a hard
concept, but they aren't used much and they aren't advocated as the
reason to use Lisp. Lisp is not Treep. It's "List Processing". And
we do ok at lists.

I agree there are some rough edges about trees, but there are in most
languages. And I just think it's in the noise with respect to why Lisp
is or is not accepted.

You can choose to regard my disagreeing with y ou as my losing my cool,
but in doing so you will entirely miss my point.

I don't have any problem acknowledging that Lisp's tree structure does
not primitively satisfy every kind of tree--it's an objective truth that
trees are often taught as ternary structures (two children and a node point)
and we don't have a primitive type for that, so you end up making it out
of two things. I just don't think the fact of that is a huge deal.

Indeed, there have been Lisps that did have these things [Maclisp had
hunks and CDC lisp had ternary conses]. The features were useful, and
were used, but were not sufficiently used that anyone minded when they
went away and were replaced by something more general: structs, which
solved other problems. So I doubt the claim on that basis as well.

A stronger criticism of Lisp would be its lack of native data structure
for a midi file or a jpg. Programmers would care a lot more about that.
But fortunately, that can be accommodated, too. And trees are not the
enabling structure to bridge that gap, incidentally.

I did find your observation interesting as "one person's opinion", btw.
And I thank you for sharing it. I just don't think it's representative
of The (as in the sense that the definite article is used) problem.
As a meta-proposition, a pluralistic world rarely has so crisp a
singleton problem.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Do people dislike parentheses or the conceptual mismatch with trees?
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