[yummyfajitas]

"The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell."

The author links to the formal specification of Haskell and decides pattern matching is "academic shitheaddery"?

Is the formal specification of Java any better? http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/gramma...

[telemachos]

I was thinking of HTML 4 specs: clearly a formatting language that many people can use (with a reasonable degree of correctness), but the spec is not light reading. (The specs for HTML are no doubt far more comprehensible than Haskell's, but I would expect the formal specification of any language to be more painful to read than it is to work with the language. In my experience, that's the nature of the formality involved in a spec: in an effort to be maximally precise and detailed, they become less and less readable).

[knieveltech]

Java (being rife with academic shitheadery itself) may not have been the best choice if you're trying to suggest the author doesn't have a point.

[yummyfajitas]

I picked Java because a) I know where to find it, b) the author mentions Java positively and c) the C++ standard costs $18.

Any formal language spec will look ugly and hard to read. That's just the nature of formal specs.

[sprout]

R5RS is a pretty light read.