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by sigmoid10 167 days ago
It does... until you switch employers. Or sometimes even just read a coworker's code. Or even your own older code. Actually no, I don't think anyone achieved full readability enlightenment. People like me just hallucinated it after doing the same things for too long.
2 comments
Yoric 167 days ago
Sadly, that is exactly my experience.
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usrnm 167 days ago
And yet, somehow Lisp continues to be everyone's sweetheart, even though creating literal new DSLs for every project is one of the features of the language.
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vkazanov 167 days ago
Lisp doesnt have much syntax to speak of. All of the DSLs use the same basic structure and are easy to read.

Cpp has A LOT A of syntax: init rules, consts, references, move, copy, templates, special cases, etc. It also includes most of C, which is small but has so many basic language design mistakes that "C puzzles" is a book.

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lmz 167 days ago
The syntax and the concepts (const, move, copy, etc) are orthogonal. You could possibly write a lisp / s-exp syntax for c++ and all it would make better would be the macros in the preprocessor. The DSL doesn't have to be hard to read if it uses unfamiliar/uncommon project specific concepts.
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vkazanov 167 days ago
Yes, sure.

What i mean is that in cpp all the numerous language features are exposed through little syntax/grammar details. Whereas in Lisps syntax and grammar are primitive, and this is why macros work so well.

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varjag 167 days ago
It's because DSLs there reduce cognitive load for the reader rather than add up to it.
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usrnm 167 days ago
Well-designed abstractions do that in every language. And badly designed ones do the opposite, again in all languages. There's nothing special about Lisp here
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varjag 167 days ago
Sure but it's you who singled out Lisp here. The whole point of DSL is designing a purpose formalism that makes a particular problem easy to reason about. That's hardly a parallel to ever-growing vocabulary of standard C++.
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bee_rider 167 days ago
I continue to believe Lisp is perfect, despite only using it in a CS class a decade ago. Come to think of it, it might just be that Lisp is a perfect DSL for (among other things) CS classes…
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