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

On Feb 19, 7:32 am, "Kjetil S. Matheussen" <k.s.matheus...@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Damien Kick wrote:
Kjetil S. Matheussen wrote:

[...] I still end up writing the macro version instead
only because "(when a b)" is faster to read
than "(when a #'(lambda () b))".

Really? Faster to read. If you sat down with a stop watch and actually
timed yourself, how long do you think it would take you to read either
form.

Its faster to read because its less messy, not because the time
looking at each token takes very much time. [...]

So one would look at each token in about the same time and then our
mental processes are supposed to get bogged down because of all the
extra "mess". What is this mess to which you're referring exactly?
Certinaly it can't be typographical messiness because you just agreed
that it would not take very much time to look at each token, whatever
a token is in this context. If we're writing a compiler, certainly
there are tokens. Are you so sure that your mental processes involve
something called tokens? Where does a token live in the brain,
exactly? And if the messiness isn't something more or less
typographical, if it is somehow semantic, why in the world would it
make any difference to use a word other than LAMBDA to try and clean
up the mess? Can't have it both ways.

Less messy. Cleaner. More readable. This is all still bull*** hand
waving to try and avoid just coming right out and saying, "I like it
better." Not because it's faster by any standard measure of time or
has been found to be so by any kind of repeatable experiment conducted
on a random sample of a relavent population or by anything even
remotely approaching so much as a pseudo-objective measure of
"goodness" or "lack of messiness". You just like it better. That's
fine. I happen to like the word LAMBDA because I like the association
with the intellectual history that gave birth to its use in Lisp. Not
for the CADDR of a WHEN form, though. But that doesn't mean that my
code, which uses LAMBDA, is "slower to read" or is somehow "messier".

I completely agree with you, though, when you write in another post in
this thread that

Hmm, I wonder if this, eh, dilemma can be solved just by using a
more intelligent text editor

I share this intution that a large part of this endless religious war
between those who hate vowels and those who love them should be solved
as a problem of customizing the display of a piece of code. I'd
posted something similiar previously <http://tinyurl.com/2trqta> and
Ray Dillinger had pointed out what he thought was a problem with the
idea <http://tinyurl.com/2rxqnd>. I haven't actually heard of a
system which customizes things like the displaying the names of the
symbols used according to user preference.

[...] Guess I should
have written faster to understand instead of faster to read,
altough it should be obvious.

I don't think it is obvious at all. When I talk about having read
something, I tend to assume that people will understand that I've read
that something and understood at least some significant portion of
that something. Perhaps I will not have understood some "deeper"
meaning but I would be able to answer at least basic questions about
it. Conversely, when I ask someone if they read a book, if they say
yes, I generally tend to imagine that they took some time to map the
glyphs to some kind of meaning. Unless, for example, I'm talking to
my four year old niece, in which case it seems that she is still
tetering on the edge of considering the act of reading to be the act
of tracing her finger under the words on the page.
.