Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

syntax is as important to me as it is to the next guy, but other
characteristics of PLs matter more, chief among them being how
many new concepts i'm required to master before i can use the
language well.

when i'm programming, all my thinking takes place within a very
simple framework:  find a data representation for my problem, then
find the best set of functions which transform these representations
to solve my problem.  r <- f[a;...;z].  iterate until done.

as a k guy, two things about joy stood out immediately:  (i) joy 
is a scalar language, and (ii) the syntax is concatenative and
not applicative.  but it turned out to be a simple matter to 
enhance joy (actually, the false language) with the k primitives 
(www.nsl.com/k//f/f.htm).  ok, i had to think about "the stack",
but that was a small price to pay for the reduction in syntactic
complexity.

factor is way too complicated for me.  i gave up early on.  i
really don't want to think about the internals of the implementation
when i'm coding.  the ONLY thing i want floating around in my head
in addition to the problem i'm working on is at most 20 or 30 purely
functional primitives, and ideally these should be divided into a
few classes of a few members each.  (granted, i haven't kept up
with factor development, so things might have gotten simpler, but
that's not the direction things seemed to be taking a few years
ago.)

typing is another language feature i don't want to think about.
i was discouraged from learning haskell because half the messages
posted in their newsgroup involved some typing conundrum.  the last 
thing i need is to get stopped in my tracks by one of these.  don't 
get me wrong.  the problems john and christopher are working on 
interest me, but there's no way i would ever use a language in
my day job which required this extra level of attention.  i guess
the easiest way to put it is that i don't want my programs to 
fail in more than five or six ways.  

oddly enough, the only language proposed in this forum i can 
imagine using is enchilada, and that's mainly for two reasons:  
(i) i've seen robbert use the language to solve hard problems
very easily, and (ii) whenever i tried to learn it, my brain
exploded.  those facts indicate to me that there are some 
powerful new ideas (but very simple ones) going on in that
language.  (i had the same experience reading john conway's
book on surreal numbers many years ago.)

now billy, who's a very creative thinker, has reported similar
problems with j and k, so this might be (it probably is) entirely
a matter of thinking-style, or maybe a function of what languages
you learned first and used most.   

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Nowak" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 4:49 AM
Subject: Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?


> 
> On Feb 20, 2009, at 1:00 PM, Joe Bowbeer wrote:
> 
>> As the old saying goes: in matters of taste, there's no argument.
> 
> True, but I don't think syntax is a "matter of taste" the same way raw  
> eel is. Different syntaxes have different qualities. For example,  
> Scheme has a syntax that is well-suited to meta-programming and  
> structural editing. Joy's syntax makes algebraic manipulation very  
> easy. Such qualities aren't subjective or matters of taste.
> 
> Of course, some elements of syntax are subjective. My concern though  
> is that it's too easy to throw out objectively useful things because  
> someone said "ewww" upon first seeing them.
> 
> - John
>