Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site kuling.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!mcvax!enea!kuling!martin From: martin@kuling.UUCP (Erik Martin) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: Using LISP for scientific programming? (gasp!) Message-ID: <799@kuling.UUCP> Date: Sun, 1-Sep-85 03:40:29 EDT Article-I.D.: kuling.799 Posted: Sun Sep 1 03:40:29 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 5-Sep-85 07:09:50 EDT References: <909@oddjob.UUCP> <163@ho95e.UUCP> <152@rtp47.UUCP> <1057@sdcsvax.UUCP> Reply-To: martin@kuling.UUCP (Per-Erik Martin) Distribution: net Organization: The Royal Inst. of Techn., Stockholm Lines: 49 In article <1057@sdcsvax.UUCP> Greg Davidson writes: >... > >LISP is in a completely different language family (applicative >languages) from FORTRAN/Pascal/C/Ada/Turing/etc. Crossing language >barriers is hard (remember going from thinking in FORTRAN to thinking >in Pascal or C, making proper use of pointers, recursion, etc.?). >... I came from FORTRAN/Pascal to Lisp. It was wonderful. >As if the semantic gulf were not enough, there's the syntax problem, >which stops most people cold at first glance. LISP's default syntax, >Cambridge prefix, looks confusing and awkward to the unpracticed, and >the ability to change syntax at will (necessary for any truly general >purpose language) is really confusing to the novice (its probably >overused by beginning LISP programmers). > >... Most scientific programmers have studied enough math to learn that with no problems at all. Hewlett Packards calculators, which use postfix syntax, are very popular among scientific engineers. >... Some LISP programmers >are really strange (like me) and write such things as: > > (/ (+ b/- ; b/- sameas (- b) > (- b/sqr (* 4 a c))/sqrt) ; etc. > (* 2 a)) >... *That* is unreadable. >... >Well, enough of silly syntax games, I think you get the point. >Now who has a suggestion about how to convince the skeptical that >the effort in changing models is worth it? > I'm afraid I don't have any, more than learning people how to write programs 'language independent'. Then they, hopefully, (a naive thought maybe) finds out for themselves in which language it is easiest to implement the programs. The real problem is, I think, that programmers are very conservative... -- Per-Erik Martin, Uppsala University, Sweden UUCP: martin@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!martin)