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by StreamBright 2447 days ago
>> Lisp derivative languages are notorious for their poor readability

Is it though?

I find at least 2 other languages more unreadable.

- Scala, with operators everywhere, you need to have a cheat sheet

- Perl, you know that joke that this is the only language that looks the same before and after RSA applied on it?

Lisp, on the other hand, is pretty readable, at least to me. I only used Clojure from the Lisp family and it had a great impact on how I think and write code in other languages. The result is more readability. For a long time MIT tought CS courses using Lisp and SICP is also a pretty amazing read.
2 comments
magicmouse 2447 days ago
Scala and Perl are even worse, i agree with you there. Some people love Haskell too, but i think it's awful.

MIT has replaced Lisp with Python, because even though they pushed forced it upon their students for decades they had to admit Lisp was archaic and not particularly readable. The Pharo IDE is arguably the most sophisticated IDE around today, but the fact remains that Lisp doesn't permit easy interchangeable parts, which is a major goal of the new programming languages being developed. Although very bright people can get very good at Lisp, the average person finds it extremely hard. Remember you are reading it from the inside-out which is highly unnatural to someone who reads books which read left-to-right.

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tsegratis 2447 days ago
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs

See: https://famicol.in/sigbovik/

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So ignoring AST/character measures of shortness; is perl reaching optimality on the noise-to-meaning ratio?

Am I allowed to say this makes perl even more meaningful than other languages?

I'm not especially serious, but in the spirit of my own stupidity, let me suggest that this is how, finally, painters can truly be hackers

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