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From: skrenta@blekko.commodore.com (Rich Skrenta)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: scheme [Re: What does an anti-perl look like]
Message-ID: <192@blekko.commodore.com>
Date: 29 Jun 91 02:52:15 GMT
References: <2935.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Lines: 29

dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips) writes:
> +Once you've banged your head enough, you become numb.  But that doesn't
> +mean the damage stops.  Lisp syntax just doesn't make good use of the
> +way human brains and visual systems work.  Practice can compensate,
> +but not totally.  It means you spend conscious energy to do what you
> +can do unconsciously with other languages.
> 
> There is almost nothing you can do unconsciously without first having
> been trained.  All you are saying is that there has been sufficient
> training/experience with other languages for internalization to have
> occurred.  That is nothing inherent in the language, it is due to an
> external artifact of experience.

I could write sentences in all-caps without proper spacing and you would
still be able to understand it.  It would just be harder for your eyes to
parse, and experience would never completely overcome this.

Mapping every semantic meaning onto the same syntactic construct makes lisp
hard for eyes to parse.

	a[i] * a[i+1]

	(* (index a i) (index a (+ i 1)))

Hmmm.  Let's do a study.  Flash equivalent code up to programmers well versed
in Lisp and an infix language and see which they can parse visually faster.

--
Rich Skrenta (skrenta@blekko.commodore.com)