18
Janet, the Platonic Ideal of Scripting Languages
(janet-lang.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
18 points (100.0% liked)
The Good Place
284 readers
1 users here now
A refugee community for r/TheGoodPlace
Rules are generally the same as on the sub, except you don’t have to worry about flairs or spoiler flags since it doesn’t look like Lemmy supports that on posts.
There is a comment spoiler tag, though—it looks like an exclamation point with a triangle around it—so you can use that to hide major spoilers if you like. Use your discretion. Spoiler tagging isn’t required, but it is a nice thing to do.
Beyond that, just make sure your posts are about The Good Place and that you try to be good to each other. It’s better than not trying.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
First encounter with a Lisp, I see.
Lisps aren't like Algols, where delimiters are visual cues for structure; what you're meant to do is ignore them, and focus on indentation instead. The advantage of having them at all instead of doing Python's thing is it's obvious how the parse tree will turn out, which gives macros the power to not suck. Additionally, Parinfer.
A language where I have to type tokens then ignore them isn't exactly the platonic ideal of a scripting language eh?
How is that different from the spaces/tabs you type at the beginning of a line though?
Well, it isn't worse, and at least it's whitespace I don't have to look at. Lisps also have to be indented, otherwise the code you write is unreadable, so that's not really a great argument.
You do have to look at it though: it takes up space on the left margin, pushing your code to the right. Plus, a decent syntax highlighter will make a Lisp's parens about as subtle as whitespace. (You might call that cheating, but remember, what we call "text" is just a sequence of voltages etched on a silicon wafer; what we see on our displays is already a monumental abstraction.)