[racket] Sweet expressions; or making it easier to introduce Racket to me and my coworkers :-)

Re-reading my message, I think I've turned into an Old Lisper. ;)

Robby

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> This whole "too many parens" thing has nothing to do with the language
> and everything to do with the programmer.
>
> I googled "javascript example callback code", took the second hit (the
> first hit seemed to go to a page with VB code; go figure) and the
> first snipped of javascript code. Guess what it ends with. Did you
> guess this:
>
>       console.log(data);
>    });
>  });
> });
>
> ? Right on!
>
> (Amusingly, the rest of the blog post seems to be about avoiding the
> nesting by giving things names :).
>
> Robby
>
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 21, 2011, at 6:44 AM, Stephen Bloch wrote:
>>
>>> Right.  Nested conditionals and loops in Racket are no more syntactically painful than nested conditionals and loops in Java/C/C++, if you put braces around the bodies.
>>> ( if ( > x y ) (+ x 3 ) ( * 4 y ) )
>>> if ( x > y ) { x = 3 ; } else { y = 4 ; }
>>
>>
>> You don't have to go non-idiomatic in Racket to approximate
>> the non-nesting, step-by-step style of C, Java, and such languages.
>>
>> Now that define is legal in many places, just give names to
>> intermediate results. More generally, here is a conjecture
>> about the psychology of programming:
>>
>>  people take to programming in C more easily than
>>  to algebra because they can 'store' intermediate
>>  results in 'registers' and take a break to contemplate
>>  what to do next.
>>
>> Warning: this is an untested conjecture by a guy who has 0
>> background in psychology or how to conduct an experiment.
>> All of this is based on observations.
>>
>> -- Matthias
>>
>>
>>
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>