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Re: Style Police (a rant)

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On Sep 17, 7:36 pm, Cthun <cthun_...@qmail.net.au> wrote:
> On 16/09/2011 6:26 AM, Retahiv Oopsiscame wrote:
> > On Sep 15, 10:37 am, Cthun <cthun_...@qmail.net.au> wrote:
> >>http://www.clojure.org/
> >>http://try-clojure.org/
>
> > Eww! No thanks.
>
> *shrug* Suit yourself. But don't knock it until you've tried it.

I'll do as I please. Your argument could as well be used to support
eating shit, jumping off a bridge without a bungee cord, or skydiving
without a parachute.

> >> [calls me a liar]
>
> > No! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
> > are at all true.
>
> What?? Where did I call you a liar?

Two posts ago.

> >> Java finally is adding something called "try-with-resources". If
> >> Java had had macros we wouldn't have needed to wait. He could have
> >> written a try-with-resources macro built around regular try. Or even
> >> if he didn't have the chops for macro writing himself, as soon as
> >> there was much demand for try-with-resources someone would have made
> >> it available as a library in short order. But instead, the Java
> >> community had to wait until Sun/Oracle got their act together and
> >> added it.
>
> > And it works, instead of being buggy as hell and prone to name capture
> > issues, and Java codebases aren't chock full of idiosyncratic macro
> > invocations but are instead pretty standardized, so any skilled Java
> > professional can easily read any of that code and maintain it.
>
> Lisps tend to accrue fairly standard libraries of third-party macros
> everyone learns to recognize.

More complexity to learn. And this stuff is supposed to make the
programmer's job *easier*?

> And of course you usually have access to the macro's source.

"Having access to" and "being able to read and understand" can
sometimes be worlds apart. In my years of working with other peoples'
code, I've seen shit that will turn you white. Also check out The
Daily WTF.

> > Sounds like Lisp easily turns into a Tower of Babel where no-one can
> > understand anyone else's code.
>
> The ability to define functions or classes already suffices to allow
> programmers to turn a language into a Tower of Babel,

Call semantics for functions are well defined -- argument evaluation,
etc. Those for macros are pretty much arbitrary -- whatever the macro
author intended. (Or didn't, but caused anyway.)

> yet nearly all languages allow user-defined functions and/or classes in
> some form or another, and ones that allow neither are considered archaic
> and crippled.

A car without an automatic ignition would also be considered archaic
and crippled; that doesn't mean a car without a satellite radio would
be.

> >> C's are much less clean because they do nothing to help avoid symbol
> >> capture and they operate on text rather than the abstract syntax tree.
>
> > Something familiar in how you write. You remind me of someone I had a
> > very long argument with here, long ago. Appropriately, his name was
> > "Bent".
>
> [implied insult deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

> >>> Most operator precedence rules you'll need will have been ingrained in
> >>> grade school math class, and you can always *elect* to parenthesize
> >>> when you want to be sure of a particular order of execution and don't
> >>> remember the precedence rule (or it goes the wrong way for your needs
> >>> in that case).
>
> >> Why leave any doubt?
>
> > There *is* no doubt, in most cases, for anyone who's graduated from
> > kindergarten.
>
> Quick quiz:

I finished school a while ago. Go fuck yourself.

> >> Besides, fully-parenthesized helps make the source code be close to a
> >> directly readable version of the abstract syntax tree.
>
> > "Readable" is obviously also in the eye of the beholder. :P
>
> Perhaps. Verbose, on the other hand, isn't, and Java is quite verbose at
> any given level of expressiveness compared to, especially, Lisps.

The price of type safety, which lets a lot more problems be caught at
compile time, and with more informative error messages.

> >> And that makes it easier for the macro processor to work, and for
> >> the coder to reason about their macros.
>
> > And now we're back to this. To satisfy your macro yen, you make the
> > whole rest of the language suck.
>
> [calls me a liar]

No, no, no! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied
about me are at all true.

> > No! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
> > are at all true.
>
> Whaaaaa?????

You heard me.

> > No! None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
> > are at all true.
>
> WTF?!?!?!

You heard me.

> >>> The problem is that it's COBOLy, BASICy, and borderline INTERCALy.
>
> >> This much is true.
>
> > A single point we agree on! Wow. :P
>
> No need for sarcasm. It means [severe implied insult deleted].

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

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Thread

Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-11 23:42 -0400
  Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-09-12 21:54 -0700
    Re: Style Police (a rant) "Cthun" <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-13 07:18 -0400
      Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-13 10:07 -0400
        Re: Style Police (a rant) Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-09-13 08:15 -0700
          Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-13 12:00 -0400
    Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-13 10:10 -0400
      Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-09-13 09:55 -0700
        Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-15 10:37 -0400
          Re: Style Police (a rant) "Cthun" <cthun_9112011@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-15 22:58 -0400
            Murphy = Troll [DO NOT FEED] thoolen <th00len@th0lenbot.thorium> - 2011-09-16 00:23 -0400
          Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-09-16 03:26 -0700
            Re: Style Police (a rant) un-Bent <dob@dib.dib.null> - 2011-09-16 13:02 +0000
              Murphy = Troll [DO NOT FEED] thoolen <th00len@th0lenbot.thorium> - 2011-09-16 22:40 -0400
            Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-17 19:36 -0400
              Re: Style Police (a rant) "kaffel'latte" <jiggingjava@qmail.net> - 2011-09-19 08:58 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) thoolen <th00len@th0lenbot.thorium> - 2011-09-19 11:56 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) "kaffel'latte" <jiggingjava@qmail.net> - 2011-09-19 17:05 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) thoolen <th00len@th0lenbot.thorium> - 2011-09-19 19:13 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) k00k Derbyshire spins freely "kaffel'latte" <jiggingjava@qmail.net> - 2011-09-19 20:45 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) k00k Derbyshire spins freely thoolen <th00len@th0lenbot.thorium> - 2011-09-21 18:37 -0400
              Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-09-26 15:13 -0700
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-09-26 19:34 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-10-01 06:49 -0700
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-10-01 09:21 -0700
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-10-01 14:17 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Wanja Gayk <brixomatic@yahoo.com> - 2011-10-01 20:53 +0200
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> - 2011-10-01 21:12 -0400
                Re: Style Police (a rant) Retahiv Oopsiscame <roopsisc@gmail.com> - 2011-10-05 06:17 -0700

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