| Stefan Schmiedl 2007-12-22, 8:13 am |
| On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:47:42 -0500
Panu <panu@nospam.com> wrote:
> Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
>
> True. But most people on this list learned to
> read natural language first. Most of them probably
> learned to read from left to right. Therefore,
> Smalltalk is more readable for most people.
True. Probably ;>
> So this "everything is relative" argument has a
> misleading flaw. Of course 'easy' means different
> things to different people. What really matters
> is what is easy for most people.
Really? IMO, what matters is how well the language
maps to the solution you come up for your problems.
If you're having a nice object based representation
of a given task, a language without objects won't
cut it. If you're dealing with a well-defined mathematical
problem, you'll probably not mind being able to define
functions with a fixed number of arguments only.
Parsing input with regular expressions is in many cases
easier to implement than using a "real" parser. And you
won't find things much more unreadable than regexps :-)
> Now, if you invest your time in learning to read
> Lisp (which I've done), the question still remains,
> does it make Lisp more readable to you, than Smalltalk,
> after a similar investment in time to learn it.
Both have simple syntax, for me there's no difference.
What I'm (sometimes) missing in Smalltalk is multiple inheritance,
but I have yet to look at the what and how of Traits.
What I'm missing in Lisp is a little bit of cleaning up
of the historically grown special cases (eg. different
accessor function names vs. different implementations
of the same message).
Dylan was, again IMHO, a step in the right direction, *before*
they decided to drop the Lisp based syntax. It looked and felt
like lisp, only lean and clean.
Merry Christmas,
s.
>
>
> -Panu Viljamaa
>
|