--- Andy Wardley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 12:55:56PM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> > I'm not a Lisp enthusiast, by and large, but I think he makes some
> > interesting observations on language design. Take a look if you're
> > feeling adventurous...
>
> I can't help feeling slightly deflated. Given the chance to
> re-design
> Lisp from scratch, the tasks on the top of my TODO list to address
> would
> be:
>
> * getting rid of some/all those damn parenthesis
> * renaming cons/car/cdr to something meaningful
Actually, sanifying some of the syntax did have the effect of removing
some parens. The other parens are necessary to part of the "philosophy"
of the language: code is data, too.
>
> Alas, these are about the only parts he's not changing. He promises
> that
> Arc will have a syntax one day, but there isn't one yet.
I think that's probably a joke. "Lisp was originally promised a syntax,
and I'm doing a flavor of lisp. If it ever shows up, I'll do it, too."
>
> The other comments that caught my eye were that Arc is designed for
> Good Programmers[tm] and that it was particularly targetted at
> developing
> web applications. Alas, my experience seems to suggest that most of
> the people writing web applications are monkeys who would rather have
> something designed for Bad Programmers, like PHP.
You know, I learned pascal, PETbasic, then PL/I; PICK {basic/asm}, then
Prolog. Then I waited a bit, and learned Perl, at least enough to get
confused a lot on this list.
I'm done with 'P'. That's it. Putative planners of programming
paradigms must proffer some prefix preferable to the pathetic
palimpsest that is 'P'!
=Austin
