The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.
As someone who also first got introduced to Lisp through SICP and Scheme, I don't really care about Lisp-1 versus Lisp-2, but I don't much fancy minimalism. I switched to CL for the type declarations and just got used to funcall and number sign+apostrophe; and minimalism means the things a larger language would provide out of the box (say, hash tables) you either need to write yourself or find a library for. Hence why various Schemes (Guile, Gauche, Chicken) have a ton of libraries beyond the standard.
In fact, I'd say CL is too minimalist, hence CLDR (a bit like SRFIs) and various libraries which form a sort of unofficial extended core (Alexandria, Bordeaux threads, CL-PPCRE,...)
But there's a value in having a defined, stable language definition. Being able to rely on the basic language not changing is a feature, not a bug. Though it does mean you have to sometimes search for a good lib if you don't have a feature built into the language.
My comment said nothing about language permanence, though I would say that some measure of evolution can sometimes be for the better. I doubt many people would prefer programming in Java 1.4 over Java 21.
The sun won't go supernova, but it will become a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, which will have roughly the same consequences for life on earth.
To be honest, I can't quite predict if humanity truly survives within the next decade or two/three or a century. Let alone millions of times more than that amount.
We humans are very likely to be our own worst enemy. I would wish for the world to exist till the 5_billion year date that you mention.
Well, in 2019 an estimated 840 people died in the U.S.A. by red light running (<https://ncsrsafety.org/stop-on-red/red-light-running-fatalit...>). That's about 2.3 people a day, so last person killed by someone running a red light was statistically about 10.5 hours ago, the last one before that about 21 hours ago.
In some parts of the U.S.A. it's legal to turn right through a red light. GP was wondering if the software can tell that the driver was making a legal right turn through the red instead of doing the thing that's obviously illegal everywhere because it's just a matter of time until you kill someone.
I mean, double quotes and curly brackets also require using the Shift key, as do the at sign, number sign, dollar sign, and ampersand. The brackets are a small enough part of the code that it doesn't matter.
Mostly these days it just requires that you start to type "print" and then press tab when appropriate, though. I feel like I relatively rarely type brackets manually for function calls. Lisp syntax doesn't seem amenable to this particular affordance?
Why not? Could just type 'print', TAB, and have it put brackets and spaces in the right positions and leave the cursor in place for the first argument.
That’s true, but the travel distance of the braces or the double quotes from the home row is much less than the travel distance from the parentheses. Just using shift isn’t the problem, it’s how far parens are from the normal hand position.
> That’s true, but the travel distance of the braces or the double quotes from the home row is much less than the travel distance from the parentheses.
That... depends on your keyboard maybe? On Dvorak the curly brackets are harder to reach than the round brackets. The open round bracket is also hit with the ring finger instead of the little finger, which is weaker.
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