<story><title>Do I Really Need a Programming Language?</title><url>http://ayudasystems.tumblr.com/post/71327185334/do-i-really-need-a-programming-language</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tikhonj</author><text>The real question here is &amp;quot;do I need syntax?&amp;quot;, or, more precisely, &amp;quot;do I really need a [complex] grammar?&amp;quot; Any given Lisp is still a programming language--it has &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; syntax and it has semantics. But it does have a &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; simpler grammar than any language (save Forth).&lt;p&gt;The grammars exist because programs are made to be read by people, not just computers. A more heterogeneous notation can make for more concise code that&amp;#x27;s easier to scan and easier to read.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is not to say that Lisp is unreadable. I actually rather like reading and writing (paredit is &lt;i&gt;awesome&lt;/i&gt;) Lisp code. But, after quite a bit of Racket, I&amp;#x27;ve found that I still heavily prefer having infix operators and a bit more syntax. At the same time, I also often want &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; noise--ie no parentheses. I want all this so that I can quickly scan and comfortably read my code. That&amp;#x27;s why we need grammars.</text></comment>
<story><title>Do I Really Need a Programming Language?</title><url>http://ayudasystems.tumblr.com/post/71327185334/do-i-really-need-a-programming-language</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>barrkel</author><text>Now show the same tree for a ruby block, a Java inner class, a C# lambda and how they&amp;#x27;re all the same.&lt;p&gt;Except they&amp;#x27;re not.&lt;p&gt;Only the simplest ASTs are directly translatable. Language semantics differ wildly when you get into higher level constructs. Not even Lisp is able to help you, as that just changes the problem from one of syntactic representation into one of library implementation.</text></comment>