<story><title>Cognition: A new antisyntax language redefining metaprogramming</title><url>https://ret2pop.nullring.xyz/blog/cognition.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noelwelsh</author><text>Some advice to the author: you can considerably tighten up your writing by putting the most important things first. Take the introduction (which is, bizarrely, not the Introduction that comes three paragraphs later.) There are over 300 words before the actual project, Cognition, is mentioned (second sentence of second paragraph). All this stuff about Lisp is great, but is that the most important part of the project? Should it not be something about the project itself?&lt;p&gt;When I&amp;#x27;m reading something informational (rather than recreational) I&amp;#x27;m always asking myself &amp;quot;is this worth my time?&amp;quot; You should address this as soon as possible, by telling the reader what the document is about right at the start. &amp;quot;Cognition is a new language exploring user modifiable syntax&amp;quot; or something similar. I didn&amp;#x27;t get past the first four paragraphs because I couldn&amp;#x27;t determine it was worth continuing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ordu</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; When I&amp;#x27;m reading something informational (rather than recreational) I&amp;#x27;m always asking myself &amp;quot;is this worth my time?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t. You will not be using this language. And even if you will, you&amp;#x27;ll get all the information from a documentation, not from this article. If your time is money you wasted your time reading the article.&lt;p&gt;Really why some people believe that all the content of Internet must be attuned to their personal quirks? Why they believe that it is better to change internet, than to adapt to what is already here? It is a text, not video or something sequential. You could scan it diagonally looking for something that is interesting for you. You could reject it if nothing was found. Or you could return to the beginning and read sequentially from there. And these features are available for a text structured in any way. I highly recommend to learn the technique, it could deal with whole books, by selecting useful pages to read and rejecting most of other pages, which tell you nothing new.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d argue that diverse article styles are much better, because they force you to consciously and actively sort through information you are consuming. You shouldn&amp;#x27;t do it passively, becouse your mind becomes lazy and stop thinking while consuming.&lt;p&gt;OTOH I would agree with you if it was not a text but a video. I hate videos because you need to decide upfront are you investing time into watching it or not. 2x speed and skips by 5-10 seconds helps somehow, but do not solve the problem.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cognition: A new antisyntax language redefining metaprogramming</title><url>https://ret2pop.nullring.xyz/blog/cognition.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noelwelsh</author><text>Some advice to the author: you can considerably tighten up your writing by putting the most important things first. Take the introduction (which is, bizarrely, not the Introduction that comes three paragraphs later.) There are over 300 words before the actual project, Cognition, is mentioned (second sentence of second paragraph). All this stuff about Lisp is great, but is that the most important part of the project? Should it not be something about the project itself?&lt;p&gt;When I&amp;#x27;m reading something informational (rather than recreational) I&amp;#x27;m always asking myself &amp;quot;is this worth my time?&amp;quot; You should address this as soon as possible, by telling the reader what the document is about right at the start. &amp;quot;Cognition is a new language exploring user modifiable syntax&amp;quot; or something similar. I didn&amp;#x27;t get past the first four paragraphs because I couldn&amp;#x27;t determine it was worth continuing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwd</author><text>The order seemed pretty rational to me.  Describe the problem, then introduce your solution.  I knew pretty much within a few sentences this was going to be some quixotic solution to a &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; 99.999% of people don&amp;#x27;t care about (including me, as I&amp;#x27;ve heard of Lisp but never used it outside of emacs config files), but I kept reading anyway, because why not.</text></comment>