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0 pointsacqq6y ago0 comments

I really enjoyed reading it! A small sample:

About JavaScript features:

“Don’t tell me it’s got lexical scope, because JavaScript’s scoping is an abomination in the face of God. Guy Steele isn’t even dead and JS scope makes him pre-emptively roll in his not-yet-occupied grave. Likewise, claiming JS is homoiconic because you can eval strings of code is nonsense. If that’s the only criteria for homoiconicity, then C is too, since you can treat an array of bytes as code and jump to it.”

Wonderful.

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braythwayt6y ago

It's a wonderful read, but having used JS since well before it attained its current status as a combination floor wax and dessert topping...

The scoping for "JavaScript, The Good Parts" is exactly the same scoping as Scheme. You can write expressive programs without ever using var, let, or const just using binding to named function arguments, which is very close to thinking in lambdas.

Of course, that style of JavaScript isn't what most people think of, and without macros, you can't build fuller-featured syntax on top of "The Good Parts."

And that's the real problem with treating JS as "a kind of Lisp." It's true that you can program in a certain minimal SICP-like style in JS, but if you have to write a Babel plugin to implement a new feature made out of closures and argument bindings... Then you really aren't programming in "a kind of Lisp" any more.

acqqOP6y ago

Still, to quote Bob Nystrom again:

"to be fair, it does have some stuff in common. So maybe it’s a fair comparison? I guess the real way to tell would be to compare Scheme to some other languages. The big feature that everyone harps on is closures. Maybe just having closures means you’re basically Scheme.

If that’s true, then C#, Lua, D, Erlang, Haskell, PHP, Scala, Go, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk are basically Scheme. In other words, if JavaScript is Scheme by that criteria, then every language is Scheme, which of course means none of them are."

Just to add, Perl has closures too:

https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=690

and to quote again:

"This is why the “JS = Scheme” meme drives me crazy: it makes us dumber. It’s a thought-terminating cliché. It carries negative informational content and makes people actually know less about languages than they did before."

braythwayt6y ago

Hey, I'm not claiming that JS is Scheme, or that Scheme is defined by closures :-)

My personal "What makes Scheme, Scheme" predates current Scheme implementations by decades. But I go with, "There are five special forms that are essentially axioms of the language, and everything else is made by combining those forms with each other."

The deep elegance of building a rich language on top of a handful of axiomatic features is what makes Scheme feel Scheme-ish to me.

I understand that Scheme has evolved since everything was implemented in terms of the special forms, but still...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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braythwayt6y ago

It's a wonderful read, but having used JS since well before it attained its current status as a combination floor wax and dessert topping...

Of course, that style of JavaScript isn't what most people think of, and without macros, you can't build fuller-featured syntax on top of "The Good Parts."

acqqOP6y ago

Still, to quote Bob Nystrom again:

Just to add, Perl has closures too:

https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=690

and to quote again:

braythwayt6y ago

Hey, I'm not claiming that JS is Scheme, or that Scheme is defined by closures :-)

The deep elegance of building a rich language on top of a handful of axiomatic features is what makes Scheme feel Scheme-ish to me.

I understand that Scheme has evolved since everything was implemented in terms of the special forms, but still...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse