Re: Noobsday (was: Paul Graham's Arc is released today... what is the long term impact?)

On Feb 12, 4:53 pm, danb <sogwal...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 12, 6:12 am, Espen Vestre wrote:
I don't understand all this hostility to lambda.
On Feb 12, 3:17 pm, danb wrote:
The name "lambda" is terrifying to newbies.
"ZOMG, what is that???

On Feb 12, 8:30 am, "Thomas F. Bur***" wrote:

("DE-fun?!?! AAAA!"),

I've never heard complaints about defun.

Of course you haven't. See, the problem with DEfun is that it's no
fun (duh!). Obviously not a problem for you since you were no fun to
begin with.

Maybe we could rename LOOP to WHEE! as well...

Very entertaining. Are you aware that "loop" is English?

And are you aware that "loop" (a) contains no exciting ! marker, and
(b) not all the world speaks English. Franchement ça fait peur !

If part of the goal is to intentionally create stumbling
blocks that weed out less adept individuals, then "lambda"
is fine.

Hello? Did I not just suggest "KITTEHS!" ? What could be more
friendly than that? Okay, they do tend to get underfoot and cause
stumbling, but really ... if someone is so scared by the KITTEHS!
special form that they don't keep reading to find out that it creates
an anonymous function ... what hope do they have with CAR (lookout!
BEEEP! *swerve*)

Haskell seems ideal for that purpose. I'm not
even saying that doesn't have its merits. The more I hang
out here, learn Lisp, and hear about patterns in the Java
community, the more I see how one might want to discourage
people who really would hurt themselves using Lisp.

Ha ha, this one time I was using MCL and cut myself on the coral,
lol. It's sharp!

Person-
ally, I'd rather do user filtering in a more substantive way,
by adding features to the language that intimidate noobs
because the features are so abstract (but not gratuitous),
instead of because their names are greek. "lambda" is
gratuitous obfuscation, and it doesn't even reduce the
character count.

chui dak c ça ki kmt avan tut, mé on le lS tomB jusqu'à la prochN
noobsday, caV ? MDR A+

Thomas
.