From: Csaba Henk <csaba@..._for_avoiding_spam.org>
Date: 2005-03-26T07:44:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting the word to conventional programmers

On 2005-03-25, Glenn Parker <glenn.parker@comcast.net> wrote:
> Csaba Henk wrote:
>> 
>> There was one interesting bit, committed by Pall, the PHP guy:
>> 
>> DevSource: If there were one core thing you could change about scripting
>> languages, what would it be?
>> 
>> Pall: Even though popular scripting languages such as Python, Perl, Tcl,
>> PHP, Javascript are all very high-level languages, they are all based on
>> an text based idiom. [...] Representing code as abstract syntax trees
>> and not streams of characters is central to huge advances in programmer
>> efficiency and simplicity.
>
> I chuckled when I read that.  The secret to "huge advances" is, wait for 
> it... LISP!  Only we'll have to drop that antiquated textual 
> representation stuff for something (?) better.  Too much PHP must rot an 
> important area of the brain, the same way candy affects your teeth.  :)

 :)

Recently I got quite fond of Io, http://www.iolanguage.com.

Io supports all the lispy stuff and even more (no difference between
object and binding; function, closure, method, lambda, macro-like
parsetree tweakers are all the same; and not *almost* everything is
message sending to an object, like in Ruby or Smalltalk, but
*everything*, perdiod). And it has a much more friendly syntax than than
of Lisp. Slightly more verbose than Ruby, but still an agile language.

Ruby:

[dog, cat, cow].each { |a| a.squeak }
[dog, cat, cow].each_with_index { |a,i| a.say "I'm the #{i}-th animal"  }

Io:

list(dog,cat,cow) foreach(i,a,a squeak)
list(dog,cat,cow) foreach(i,a,
  a say("I'm the " .. (i asString) .. "-th animal")
)

Note that in "foreach(i,a,a squeak)" there is no syntactic difference
between the index/value pair which are to be used as immediate values
and the "block argument", to say it in ruby lingo, which is to be
run in each iteration. This phenomenon becomes much more interesting
when you discover you can as well write methods like this. 

So the point is that you can get "lisp powa" in a modern scripting
language as well without burying yourself under tons of parens and
whew-how-the-heck-should-I-name-this-one like function names.

Csaba