Re: Xah on Lisp

Dear lispers and functional programers,

there's this Don Geddis now having a debate with me.

The debate is about 2 criticisms on lisp, namely its irregularities in
its nested syntax and its use of cons for list. The criticism is
presented in this essay:
“The Fundamental Problems Of Lisp” at
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w..._problems.html
(originally a newsgroup post)

The debate is in this long winding thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....ee331cfe13f214
The debate start at the message where the subject is changed to “Xah
on Lisp”.

i ran out of patience in dealing with Don.

Is he just fucking with me? or should i really try a earnest effort at
the debate?

For example, he asked for concrete examples. My essay, are perhaps
over 10 thousands words counting all supporting essays linked from it.
Though, sometimes in complex issues that may not be sufficient. Also,
a open publication for the general public really needs painstaking
efforts and volumes of examples, theorizations, citations.

I can see how i could actually add some more concrete scenarios on how
the lisp irregularity reduces the syntax's power. But that takes much
more effort. I mean, to really present my criticism well is almost
like writing a publishing quality booklet. It could be a full time 2
week's job.

But, i do think my essay really sufficiently showed my ideas to any
computer language expert who are intelligent and open minded. Don
idiot avows that he don't see any point in it. I have no doubt lispers
like Rainer Joswig don't get it at all too. I'm not sure lisper Pascal
J Bourguignon would have anything good to say about it. Sure, these
are Common Lisp fanatics. Their opinions on a piece of negative
criticism on lisp can be safely discarded. What i would like to know,
is that whether the essay is really that unreasonable, insufficient,
in getting its idea across?

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

Rainer Joswig wrote:

> It's the same in Emacs Lisp. You don't even understand the basics.
>
> Look, this is ELISP:
>
> ELISP> (setq myprogram '(defun foo (a) (print a)))
> (defun foo
> (a)
> (print a))
>
> ELISP> (eval myprogram)
> foo
> ELISP> (listp myprogram)
> t
> ELISP> (foo 3)
> 3
> ELISP> (setq myprogram1 '(defun foo))
> (defun foo)
>
> ELISP> (listp myprogram1)
> t
> ELISP> (eval myprogram1)
> *** Eval error *** Wrong number of arguments: defun, 1
>
> Program source was a valid s-expression in both cases.
> Both were lists.

it's not about the lists. It's about syntax.

For example, let's say this non lang plain text:

[something [3 4] [yes [nah] oh] no but]

can you see, the regularity of this text? In in is a textual
representation of a tree.

And such textual representation, can be manipulated by a text editor
with a simple lexical scan, and do all sort of transformation on it,
yet the editor or tool needs not to know any meaning of it. You see?
XML is a good example.

But now let's say, instead of the regularity in
[something [3 4] [yes [nah] oh] no but]
you have
[something [3 4] yes[ [nah] oh] no] ; but

can you see that, it no longer has a simple tree structure?

For more detail, see:

★ “Fundamental Problems of Lisp”
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w..._problems.html

★ “The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully
Functional Notations”
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/notations.html

> Xah, learn something useful to participate here, or just go and do
> something
> else. Paint keyboard bindings or such.

do you mean you liked my ergonomic based emacs shortcut set?

★ “A Ergonomic Keyboard Shortcut Layout For Emacs”
http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html

this messag is posted to: comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.scheme,
comp.lang.functional .

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄