Re: Language Marketing (was: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood)

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

You're right of course; more important to have few tokens
than short tokens.  

I have found though that short tokens have some unexpected
benefits.  In Lisp there are some names that send your
code flying toward the right side of the screen, and 
often eventually force you to break lines you'd rather not.
The CL

(mapcar #'(lambda

becomes

(map (fn

in Arc, and trivial as this kind of renaming seems I've
found it makes a difference in the way the language feels.

Arc right now is half written in Arc and half in CL, and
the CL bits are starting to feel like ill-fitting shoes.
I find myself writing macros to make the CL code look
more like Arc, because e.g. I can't stand all the extra
parens I have to type in a CL let now.

The J quicksort is impressively short in tokens as well as
characters.  Is that the canonical way to write it?

--pg

--- Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 15:45:13 -0800 (PST)
> > From: Paul Graham <paulgraham@yahoo.com>
> > 
> > We're designing Arc roughly for the language equivalent
> > of the 1970 Porsche 911 market.  People who want to 
> > solve hard problems with few tokens, and who are not
> > going to be intimidated by what a language has to look
> > like to do that.
> > 
> 
> I think you also have to distinguish between conceptual density and
> token
> density.  I like languages that allow interesting programs to be
> expressible using a minimal number of language constructs.  I care
> much
> less whether the language construct is called "fn" or "lambda" or
> "make-function".
> 
> To give an extreme example, the language J (a modern APL;
> http://www.jsoftware.com) has a high conceptual density (good) and
> also
> encourages programs that are written in a line-noise syntax with very
> few
> characters (bad, IMO).  This gives rise to programs like this one,
> which
> does quicksort:
> 
>     sel =: 1 : ']#~]x.{.'
>     qs  =: ] ` ($:@(<sel),=sel,$:@(>sel))@.(1:<#)
> 
> I think the J designers could have produced a much clearer language
> if they
> expanded some of the functions into full names instead of one- or
> two-letter abbreviations.  Of course, you can do this yourself in J,
> so
> it's not really a swipe at the language as much as at the culture.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 


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