Friday, January 13, 2006

 

Fits like a glove

I've had a dry spell of coding at home, between the holidays and reading "Ajax in Action", but reading some of the long postings at Planet Lisp should be enough to guilt any slacker back into action.

This has uncovered yet another advantage of Common Lisp, at least for me; how short a time it takes to get back up to speed with the language after being away from it. It takes me considerably less time to get back "in the groove" than with other languages, with less references to language manuals. I don't know how this is for others, but Lisp fits my brain.

I think this is because of the lack of syntax. Instead of having to remember operator precedence, the operators themselves, strings of characters that look like Yosemite Sam swearing, it's just almost-English words and parentheses. The language is built on just a few core concepts that can be mixed and matched, instead of a bunch of rigid rules and details that have to be remembered.

Comments:
Having documentation built into your environment is pretty important, too.
 
At least fast documentation. I prefer the immediate but out-of-the-way function completion in the minibuffer to the delayed, overlayed completion in NetBeans.
 
Funny how you seem to need the completion in Java more, with all the casts and package references (I use IntelliJ, completion works basically the same way). I like the minibuffer completion much better as well.

Actually, it's funny how many of the things I love about IntelliJ I don't miss when using SLIME, mainly because they are just covering up some of the drudgery of Java.
 
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