Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tambourine_man 924 days ago
I think that's what they call Stockholm syndrome
3 comments

I think that's a bit harsh - this was a complex system written in Common Lisp that had a front end in NeWS with some C plumbing linking the two together.

PostScript and Lisp are actually pretty similar when the former is used in an interactive graphical environment (i.e. not on a printer!).

I said it in jest, sorry. I wrote a bit of PostScript because I absolutely had to and it was painful, even though I was thrilled to eventually push through.

But I'm very particular about syntax, so the reverse polish notation was enough to upset me. Needless to say, I appreciate Lisp for its power and conceptual simplicity but would never choose to use it.

Out of interest, which programming language do you prefer?
Oh, the most boring ones. Anything with a C-like syntax is off to a good start.

I like pragmatic languages, with minimum boilerplate.

If I had to list: C, JavaScript, Python and PHP, in no particular order. And I like Bash too, even if it’s less a language and more just a thin veneer of control flows, loops and variables for controlling other executables, it’s still quite useful.

PostScript is a pretty good programming language for what it's meant to do, which is put vector graphics in a box. It was the first language I wrote a lot of code in just for fun and not for school or work, specifically to draw a bunch of fractals. It's particularly well suited for that type of graphics whose structure is mathematically determined by a simple algorithm.
I mean, it’s a perfectly serviceable postfix Lisp. Postfix Lisps are nice! Other things in the page layout language are less nice (e.g. the nonexistent i18n), but the programming parts are quite pleasant, I think.