Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

> Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 17:17:51 -0400
> From: "Michael St . Hippolyte" <mash@brooklyndigital.net>
> 
> > a note to language designers: don't worry about the syntax, the syntax
> > is the easy part, it's the API which is hard. i think it took me about
> > 5 minutes to figure out the difference between at atom and a list in
> > common lisp, but i still try to call gethash like (gethash hash key)
> > as opposed to (gethash key hash) (analogous things exist in every
> > useful and used library).
> 
> I disagree, a language designer *should* worry about the syntax.  To
> come up with syntax that someone can learn in five minutes takes
> hard work or brilliant inspiration.  More importantly, the syntax of
> a language determines as much as anything else what's easy to do in
> the language and what's difficult (the other major determinants being
> the API and the available tools).
> 

I think syntax is important, but not in the way most people think.  I like
s-expression syntax not because it's the prettiest (it isn't), or because
it's the most readable (it isn't), but because it's the most scalable.  You
can, in effect, beat the living crap out of it (e.g. with macros) and it
still looks the same.  

Mike