This weekend, I was reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. At one point, he is talking about automatic behaviours:
Doing several things at once is essential even in carrying out a single task. To play the piano, we must move the fingers properly over the keyboard while reading the music, manipulating the pedals and listening to the resulting sounds. But to play the piano well we should do these things automatically. Our conscious attention should be focused on the higher levels of the music, on style, and on phrasing. So it is with every skill. The low-level, physical movements should be controlled subconsciously.
[Wow. In typing that paragraph out, I see all sorts of parallels to math, volleyball, cooking, and pretty much every other area of my life. But, for this essay, I’m just going to focus on what brought me here.]
People who are new to Lisp often end up complaining The parentheses. Man, too much with the parentheses.
It’s an understandable complaint, but it’s just like complaining There are too many keys on this piano
. It is a complaint that will go away after a small amount of practice.
Here is one sample from many, many similar threads in the Usenet news group comp.lang.lisp:
Bill Dubuque wrote:
Leo Sarasua wrote:
Let's face it: all the ((((... and )))) in Lisp are awfully unreadable.
Seasoned Lisp programmers see past parentheses just as a seasoned
reader of a printed language sees past the individual characters
comprising a word.
Parentheses? What parentheses? <g> Like you say, I stopped seeing them
after about a week of serious Lisp.
...
My retort to "what about all those parentheses?" is "do spaces between
words bother you?". <g>
The parenthesis are an unconscious action. They are part of the flow, not an interruption in it. Looking back on the programming classes that I took in high school and college, most everything was at the this is the next piano key
level. Part of that is out of necessity. You have to learn where your feet are before you learn to walk or to run or to dance. [And, in a classroom setting, thirty people have to learn where their feet are before any of you can move on.] But, part of it is just tragic omission.
Teachers should share some glimpses of the future: the higher levels of the music, on style, and on phrasing.
Teachers should talk about how some day, you’ll no longer be tripping over the parentheses. You will be dancing with them, complex dances, with grace and power.
Live coding demos? If you watch someone skilled at programming doing it, you see that this stuff doesn’t get in the way. With practice, the syntax becomes unconscious and automatic. So, I leave you with some live coding demos. The first is Andrew Sorensen performing with the scheme package Impromptu.
Day of the Triffords from Andrew Sorensen on Vimeo.
The second is Sven Van Caekenberghe implementing a Reddit clone in Lisp in twenty minutes:
