Maybe prefix notation feels weird because English (and Chinese, and Spanish, and Russian...) follow the subject-verb-object word order. “list.append(3)”, for example, is in SVO order, while “(append list 3)” is in VSO order.
Most languages primarily use either SOV or SVO word-orderings, with VSO trailing at a distant third. Funnily enough, both Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew are VSO languages. Looks like God does speak Lisp after all.
This is an interesting point, I haven’t thought about the relation to SVO/etc. before! I wonder whether SVO/SOV dominance is a historical quirk, or if the human brain actually is optimized for those.
The verb-first emphasis of prefix notation like in classic Lisp is clearly backwards sometimes. Parsing this has high mental overhead relative to what it’s expressing:
and in the expressions after ->> the previous expression gets substituted as the last argument to the next.
Thanks to the Lisp macro system, you can write a threading macro even in a Lisp that doesn’t have it (and I know that for example in Racket you can import a threading macro package even though it’s not part of the core language).
I’m the opposite. My first two languages are VSO, so VSO ordering (function first, then arguments) comes naturally to me. Some languages are SOV—Japanese is the most prominent example. Don’t think I know of any proglangs with that form of syntax, though.
In programming, SOV is known as Reverse Polish Notation. First must the arguments come before the operation you write. Forth, Postscript also, such languages are.
Maybe prefix notation feels weird because English (and Chinese, and Spanish, and Russian...) follow the subject-verb-object word order. “
list.append(3)”, for example, is in SVO order, while “(append list 3)” is in VSO order.Most languages primarily use either SOV or SVO word-orderings, with VSO trailing at a distant third. Funnily enough, both Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew are VSO languages. Looks like God does speak Lisp after all.
This is an interesting point, I haven’t thought about the relation to SVO/etc. before! I wonder whether SVO/SOV dominance is a historical quirk, or if the human brain actually is optimized for those.
The verb-first emphasis of prefix notation like in classic Lisp is clearly backwards sometimes. Parsing this has high mental overhead relative to what it’s expressing:
I freely admit this is more readable:
Clojure, a modern Lisp dialect, solves this with threading macros. The idea is that you can write
and in the expressions after
->>the previous expression gets substituted as the last argument to the next.Thanks to the Lisp macro system, you can write a threading macro even in a Lisp that doesn’t have it (and I know that for example in Racket you can import a threading macro package even though it’s not part of the core language).
As for God speaking in Lisp, we know that He at least writes it: https://youtu.be/5-OjTPj7K54
Mandatory xkcd’s links: https://xkcd.com/224
I’m the opposite. My first two languages are VSO, so VSO ordering (function first, then arguments) comes naturally to me. Some languages are SOV—Japanese is the most prominent example. Don’t think I know of any proglangs with that form of syntax, though.
In programming, SOV is known as Reverse Polish Notation. First must the arguments come before the operation you write. Forth, Postscript also, such languages are.