Hi Dave, First, thank you for your time reading the article and giving feedback about it. I acknowledged your contribution on the article, if there’s any URL associated with your name that you’d like me to link, please let me know. Or, if there’s any reason why you *don’t* want to be acknowledged, just tell me and I’ll remove it.
> The article is well written in the sense that I had no trouble > following along and the concepts all made sense, but I think it needs > some clarification on the meta level. > > Although I understood the text of the article I found myself confused > about its ultimate point. It started off by talking about the > "essential features" of a programming language, but did not explain > why I should care or what I would learn from the paper. That's fine > if you're aiming at an academic audience who are focused on > theoretical concepts, but it doesn't work if your target demographic > is "all programmers" who are doing "everyday programming". > > After the introduction there followed a long section about replacing > numbers with other representations. Although I understood *what* was > being done, I didn't understand *why* it was being done, or what I was > expected to learn from it. I found myself skimming, looking for a > point, and eventually stopped reading partway through in frustration. > > There was a paragraph at the beginning that tried to cover this: > > "Besides satisfying a curiosity, this article introduces programming > techniques that are generally applicable in everyday programming. And, > for people starting in programming-language design and analysis, this > article introduces a minimal programming language core from which to > build." > > This seemed to mesh poorly with the content of the article; the > techniques are claimed to be "applicable in everyday programming", but > there's no way that I'm actually going to use Peano numbers, ever, > except in an artificial environment such as a theoretical paper or a > homework assignment. You’re right in saying that you’re probably never going to directly use any of the encodings introduced in the article. But I’m sure you can use some of the techniques behind the encodings. For example, delaying computations by wrapping them in functions, or receiving functions as arguments when there isn’t enough information to act. I’d bet you even use some of these techniques already, and you re-discovered them by using your intuition. In that case, it’s nevertheless valuable to identify the patterns, and to understand how they work and how to apply them in future problems. The *Conclusion* goes over the whole journey of the article one more time. It specifically highlights the techniques that are the major takeaways, and gives more examples of how to use them in different contexts. I didn’t go into those tangents in the main matter because I wanted to avoid loosing focus and, consequently, reader attention. Also, as you noted, it is a long read already. In any case, do you think the article would be more appealing to you if I had taken a different approach and intertwined the encodings with discussions about the underlying techniques and their uses? Anyhow, I’m sorry the article frustrated you and that you didn’t finish reading it. I’m writing more articles and hopefully in the future you can find one that interests you :) > As a closing thought, I found the example of bicycle-trip-tracking to > be excellent -- it clearly delineated the difference between an > essential feature and a convenience. Thank you. I’m glad that point came across. > PS: > Also, if you'll pardon some really nitpicky stuff, here's a couple > minor copyedits because I cannot turn off my English major brain: > > "satisfy curiosity", not 'satisfying a' > > "they use fewer features", not 'less features'. Fewer is for countable > nouns, less is for mass nouns. "Fewer features", "less salt". I fixed the errors you pointed out. Thank you very much. English is not my first language and I really appreciate the free copy editing :) Best. -- Leandro Facchinetti <lfacc...@jhu.edu> https://www.leafac.com GPG: 0x5925D0683DF3D583 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
