Re: Re: Re: Productivity and Perl

You caught me -- my "lisp" experience such as it is consists of Scheme and Emacs Lisp. My example may have been inaccurate, but I wouldn't say it is misleading. The point is just that Java expresses the same things in more words (or lines). While writing a function in either language, you spend some time deciding to use a particular approach, then some more typing it in. I'd say the "thinking about it" part takes about the same amount of time for similar things. Then you go to type them in, and the Java one has more lines, but it's probably faster per-line to write. Last time I programmed in Java, I even had a macro for

} catch (IOException e) {
    // Loathe Java
    System.out.println("IO error: " + e);
}
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Which gave me 4 lines (ok, 3 lines) almost for free. Certainly, these 4 lines are much more quickly generated than 4 lines of quasiquoted macro glop in Lisp.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Productivity and Perl by hding (Chaplain) on Jun 02, 2002 at 21:27 UTC
You caught me -- my "lisp" experience such as it is consists of Scheme and Emacs Lisp. This may also have influenced your perception of Lisp's object system; I don't think that CLOS is awkward at all, and it certainly needn't involve mucking about with closures in any way (although an implementor could do it that way if desired, I suppose). Also, though Common Lisp does have catch and throw, they're not typically the way (at least in their raw form) one would handle errors. Better to use the condition system which is provided for that very purpose and which is quite powerful. Kent Pitman (one of the authors of the part of the spec about conditions) has some articles which I'm too lazy to find pointers to right now. The chapter in the spec on conditions is perfectly readable to get a start in the right direction on using it. (In short, to get Java-like functionality, one can define errors using `define-condition`, "throw" them using `error`, and "catch" them using `hander-case`. This suffices to do a lot. Then one can learn to use the rest of the system to do all kinds of other miraculous and fascinating things :-) - Pitman's papers will probably give a better explanation than I.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Productivity and Perl
by hding (Chaplain) on Jun 02, 2002 at 21:27 UTC

You caught me -- my "lisp" experience such as it is consists of Scheme and Emacs Lisp.

This may also have influenced your perception of Lisp's object system; I don't think that CLOS is awkward at all, and it certainly needn't involve mucking about with closures in any way (although an implementor could do it that way if desired, I suppose).

Also, though Common Lisp does have catch and throw, they're not typically the way (at least in their raw form) one would handle errors. Better to use the condition system which is provided for that very purpose and which is quite powerful. Kent Pitman (one of the authors of the part of the spec about conditions) has some articles which I'm too lazy to find pointers to right now. The chapter in the spec on conditions is perfectly readable to get a start in the right direction on using it. (In short, to get Java-like functionality, one can define errors using define-condition, "throw" them using error, and "catch" them using hander-case. This suffices to do a lot. Then one can learn to use the rest of the system to do all kinds of other miraculous and fascinating things :-) - Pitman's papers will probably give a better explanation than I.)

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