Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrycoder | Hacker News Reader

But, you always have good editor support. Lisp/Scheme has traditionally been coded using Emacs or its equivalent. With that support, the parens seem to disappear after you've been writing lisp for awhile.

Beginner lispy languages come with a suitable beginner IDE, e.g. Racket or Logo.

A typical lisp statement has a leading '(' and a trailing ')', which replaces the ';' in Algol-like languages. So, one additional character, which brings a lot of benefit when writing DSLs and macros.

(Python doesn't have the ';', but its whitespace is ambiguous, so that's not a fair comparison.)

Sane people don't write lisp using Notepad.

View on HN

I tried using Slime with Scheme when I was doing SICP. I’m sure it’s great when you know it well, but I kept pressing the wrong shortcut and moving things around in ways I didn’t intend and then it wouldn’t let me manually type or delete parentheses to fix things. I found it very frustrating and ended up turning it off.

Just another barrier and C-style languages seem much easier to write in comparison.

Slime did that? Slime doesn't take over the editor that much (it shouldn't prevent you from typing parentheses, I've used it for 16 years or so and never experienced anything like that). Was it paredit or another editor mode?

Sorry you’re right, it would have been Paredit.

I guess my point is that syntax that works very well with a correctly configured editor used by someone who knows what they’re doing is going to have a higher barrier to entry than a language that can be easily edited in Notepad.

Lisp is no harder to edit in notepad than any other language. It is just a text editor and lisp source is just text. And paredit is a misfeature for most people, turn it off. That should have been the real takeaway. It is not part of a ”correctly configured editor” and it isn’t installed or activated by default anyways so is easy to avoid.

Yeah, all you have to do is keep track of the number of closing parens in your head.

It’s a lot easier when the editor highlights matching pairs.

I don't know of any language that can be easily edited in Notepad.

Not even English.

In case you didn’t know — DrRacket (IDE for the how to design programs book) has a language directive you can run that sets up DrRacket as if it were the environment the sicp authors expect the reader to have.

I only found out after going through SICP using chez scheme’s repl (which I had to compile myself).

I think the parent comment is alluding to the notion that the very entry level programmer enjoys being able to use notepad. That is to say the initial barrier of eMacs is just too much. Obviously worth it in the long run though.

“eMacs” is the wrong capitalization. It’s “Emacs”.

M-c would fix that I believe.

My autocorrect has been doing that for some reason and I assumed there was logic to it. Your comment sent me on a dive that proved my intuition woefully incorrect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com