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Comment by ludwigvan | Hacker News Reader

Interesting point. This might also explain why Lisp never really went mainstream.

It might also be that your brain is just more used (years of extra experience) to infix notation. So why not take advantage of this ? In the monad world, people also prefer (>>=) to bind. OTOH, how long does your brain need to get used to other notations? As an aside, his arguments are completely debunked if you use RPN.

   > Commutative: a b + == b a + 
   > Associative: a b c + + == a b + c +
   > ...

> It might also be that your brain is just more used (years of extra experience) to infix notation.

Maybe infix notations is preferred because it aligns more closely to natural language grammar (for some languages)

Infix notation is preferred because the binary operator is visually close to both of its operands. The same equations as GP, but == is also postfix:

   > Commutative: a b + b a + ==
   > Associative: a b c + + a b + c + ==
   > ...

As expressions getting larger and larger the operands are getting farther away from their operators. RPN is great for computers to read and maybe humans to write (RPN calculators). Not so much for humans to read.

> It might also be that your brain is just more used (years of extra experience) to infix notation.

I’ve recently started to work with a program that uses Reverse Polish (postfix) notation [1] to implement mathematical equations and I find it very hard to make sense of the equations from the syntax. I hadn’t previously been aware that there were other alternatives to infix notation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

Why do you use infix for ==?

otherwise the challenged would not understand my point ;)

I thought I might get some anecdotal evidence for this by teaching our daughter Scheme (and prefix notation) before she enters elementary school :-)

That sounds great. The syntactic simplicity of prefix notation and Scheme seem particularly suited for early education. I imagine it will help form a intuitive mental model of computation and mathematics, before being taught the classic infix notation. I guess you'll see!

function1 >>= function2 >>= function3 >>= function4

bind bind bind function1 function2 function3 function4 -- Throw parentheses at random until it compiles

It's very easy to see why people prefer the operators.

Counterpoint: Java.

Java was designed during a time when operator overloading was considered abysmal language design.

But that was mostly due to the experiences collected with C++ (or maybe also Perl?).

I have dreams of throttling the person who decided that operator overloading was overrated every time I work with BigInteger.

It's one of the things I really like about scala, x call y is always equivalent to x.call(y)

This combined with relaxed method name restrictions allow you to do "operator overloading" in quite a sane way and allow you to write bigint + 1 or set contains element.

Kotlin is a bit more conservative and only translated the built-in operators to fixed methods: + to the plus method etc.

The worst part is there is a talk by Steele called Growing a Language about designing Java where specifically talks about the importance of overloading so that things like future number representations like BigInteger can be first class

Do you have examples of real world code you had to write with BigInteger? just for amusements sake

I can't seem to find the file for it, but I solved #2 on this with Java and wanted to die by the end of it: http://socalcontest.org/history/2017/SC2017ICPCProblems.pdf

Write your program on ints and then transform it with sed before compiling.

That sounds significantly more difficult.

Perl 5.000 came out in 1994, the same year as Java.

Perl didn't even have objects before that.

So no it wasn't from experience with Perl.

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