Lol, like what? Go have a layperson check if a file exists. Or pass a substring of UTF-8 to C function. Or check equality of two floating point calculations. Or multiply two signed integers together. Or fix anything that doesn't work due to performance problems.
And when they do all these wrong, ask them to show you how to debug and correct a useful but 'simple' program in production.
Lay people can't express their ideas to a computer because their ideas don't work in a computer. The code is esoteric because logic is esoteric, and the human brain is just not good at reasoning about edge cases without years of practice and experience.
>I'm not saying that unintuitive, highly-formalized syntaxes are useless, just like assembly isn't useless.
Ok, good. So why did you object to the existence of LISP? Why would you say it is a mistake?
In any case, my overall point in all of this is that there's a difference between simplifying a language and simplifying the learning experience. We should always be looking to make things easier to learn, but that doesn't actually require changes to the language. You can do that by finding better ways of teaching, better documentation, and better explanations for how and why things work.
Lol, like what? Go have a layperson check if a file exists. Or pass a substring of UTF-8 to C function. Or check equality of two floating point calculations. Or multiply two signed integers together. Or fix anything that doesn't work due to performance problems.
And when they do all these wrong, ask them to show you how to debug and correct a useful but 'simple' program in production.
Lay people can't express their ideas to a computer because their ideas don't work in a computer. The code is esoteric because logic is esoteric, and the human brain is just not good at reasoning about edge cases without years of practice and experience.
>I'm not saying that unintuitive, highly-formalized syntaxes are useless, just like assembly isn't useless.
Ok, good. So why did you object to the existence of LISP? Why would you say it is a mistake?
In any case, my overall point in all of this is that there's a difference between simplifying a language and simplifying the learning experience. We should always be looking to make things easier to learn, but that doesn't actually require changes to the language. You can do that by finding better ways of teaching, better documentation, and better explanations for how and why things work.