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by arjunnarayan 4408 days ago
My brain is throwing all sorts of parse errors at that quote full of quotes. This is why we have escape characters! (Or, more realistically, two forms of quotation marks for nesting).
1 comments

Or separate symbols for the beginning and end of a quote, so nesting is unambiguous. You know, something like:

(quote Wonder what their victims word cloud would look like? (quote Mercy) (quote Please) (quote I'm begging) (quote I want my Mommy!) (quote Help))

Everyone just needs to learn s-expressions.

A professor collaborator of mine has the habit of saying "that does not parse", or "that does not type-check" to nonsensical sentences uttered by clueless research students (full disclosure, that set includes me). At first I found it somewhat weird, but now I've grown to respect it. It totally makes sense.

I remember in high school (when I was already a proficient programmer, but still within-grade in the other sciecnes), struggling with some hard physics problems, and running to my dad for help: he would always say: "dimensional analysis". If only I had connected the dots: doing "dimensional analysis" in your work is _exactly_ the same as type-checking your manually executed paper algorithm. This lightbulb went off in my head approximately a decade too late...

We repeated dimensional analysis in my first physics class until everybody got it ( all six of us... ).