Reporting system - declarative

[Donald Allen]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 1:50 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:
>
> >> (cond ((> x 5) (fun a b))) ;; I won't even attempt to properly indent
> this
> >> in gmail
> >>
> >> vs.
> >>
> >> if x > 5:
> >>
> >
> > I'm not sure how I fat-fingered this, but the message got sent
> prematurely,
> > destroying my credibility:-)
> >
> > Anyway, you get my point -- writing that conditional in Python or C looks
> > more natural to people and so they prefer it to Scheme/Lisp on those
> narrow
> > terms, forgetting what working in Scheme buys you (personally, I'm more
> > productive in Scheme than any other language, and I've written code over
> a
> > long career in most of them; Python is also a strong contender in the
> > productivity dept., but there's a lot more to learn and keep in mind than
> > with Scheme; it's a much more complex language, even though the code
> looks
> > simple).
>
> Um, I don't see a *HUGE* difference between:
>
> if (x > 5)
> {
>   if-clause ...
> }
> else
> {
>   else-clause ...
> }
>
> vs:
>
> (if (> x 5)
>  (if-clause)
>  (else-clause)
>  )
>
> To *my* eyes they look very close (modulo the x > 5 vs. > x 5)
>

Yes, that's true. There *are* things in Scheme that look much like C or
Python and 'if' is one of them, which is why I chose 'cond' and not 'if'
for my example. But despite that overlap, I think there's enough in Scheme
that looks weird to people used to other languages (you identified one of
them -- infix vs. prefix in predicates and also the obvious -- use of
prefix notation in arithmetic expressions) that they reject it on what I
would consider much too narrow grounds, failing to carefully weigh the
advantages against the perceived disadvantages.

/Don

>
> > /Don
>
> -derek
>
> --
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>