use Perl

• ASCII, car/cdr (Score:1)

  by jrockway (7171)

  First, the ASCII issue. PHP, Ruby, Perl 5.6, etc., etc. don't support Unicode. Those saw plenty of use anyway. (PG mentions on his site that people wouldn't have complained about this if he hadn't brought it up. I agree; this is whining about the bikeshed color.)
  
  Next, car and cdr. Most LISP programmers I've talked to (including myself), prefer car and cdr to head and tail or first and rest. First, head/tail and first/rest don't make much sense when applied to an improper list (i.e. (cons 1 2)). car/c
  • Re:ASCII, car/cdr (Score:2)

    by schwern (1528) on 2008.02.01 2:28 (#60820) Homepage Journal

    Was that reply a joke? I hope it was, but in case it wasn't...

    PHP, Ruby, Perl 5.6, etc., etc. don't support Unicode. Those saw plenty of use anyway.

    Perl 5.6 does support Unicode... badly, but it does support it. And what was one of the major things we put into 5.8 (begun in 2000) despite it causing vast amounts of internals grief? Unicode. Also keep in mind that 5.6 development started in 1998 when you could still fool yourself that ASCII was all you needed. Even so, the diverse array of Perl developers recognized it was necessary even if it was very painful.
    
    It's not that Arc doesn't support Unicode, it's that Paul dismisses Unicode. Some sort of spurious feature like syntax highlighting. If Paul had said something like "the first release of Arc doesn't support Unicode yet" that would be something else entirely. It's obvious he just doesn't get it...

    PG mentions on his site that people wouldn't have complained about this if he hadn't brought it up. I agree; this is whining about the bikeshed color.

    ...and neither do you.
    
    Of course you agree that ASCII is fine, YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!
    
    Perhaps you're embedded so deep inside America that you haven't had to input or output anything but English in your programming, but how can you dismiss programmers in most of Europe, all of Asia and South America? Even English speaking programmers in the UK for example have to talk with the rest of Europe. Canadian programmers have to deal with French (sorry, fr-ca). And sometimes, yes, even Americans have to deal with something other than English.
    
    How can this possibly be the 100 year language? You can't pretend the rest of the world doesn't use computers any more and you can't pretend they're all going to do it in English. They just won't use your language. And anyone who has to work with folks outside America won't use it either.

    Most LISP programmers I've talked to (including myself), prefer car and cdr

    Who cares what LISP programmers think, they're already trained to think in LISP! The 100 year language should not be thinking about the current generation or programmers but the next generation of programmers and the one after that and after that. Forget the 100 year language, any new language should be thinking about how to make sense to the programmer not already steeped in their culture.
    
    And, I admit this is a low blow, but if your language's audience is existing LISP programmers... let's just you're fighting for a slice of an awfully small pie.
    
    Ok, don't call it head/tail but call it something that's not an acronym for a function on a piece of hardware that's older than most programmers today and nobody's ever used. Might as well just make up random three character strings for all the use it is remembering what it does.
    

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    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chromatic (983)

      Even English speaking programmers in the UK for example have to talk with the rest of Europe.

      English speaking programmers in the UK who want to get paid have to deal with the Euro symbol, which isn't in ASCII. They can't fall back on the pound symbol either.
      • Re:ASCII pedantry (Score:2)

        by grantm (164)

        Actually, programmers in the UK are more likely to be paid in British pounds. Of course the symbol for that (£) isn't ASCII either. Even Americans can't render the symbol for cents (¢) without venturing outside ASCII.