Actually, variations on M-expressions have been created many times in the Lisp world. (Look what you can do with macros!) So far, none of them has caught on. The latest attempt for Scheme is SRFI-266, which creates a very nice infix expression sublanguage. If I were working on a team, I would encourage them to use this, but I don't know if it has enough traction to become widespread.
It's a common mistake to think that the syntax of Lisps are a problem. People solving the supposed problem then discover it wasn't something that needed to be solved.
I'm on a convertible as I read this comments thread; I'm typing this comment on the keyboard, and scrolling the comments via the touchscreen.
I have never bought the argument that there should be one modality of input (or output). I'm basically a keyboard guy, but I use a pointing stick, mouse, trackball, or stylus/touchscreen as appropriate. Some applications benefit from direct contact, others really prefer keyboard input. Further, various disabilities prioritize modalities as well: someone may have serious trouble typing or pointing, and visually-impaired people may prefer voice and speech.
So all these rhapsodies of fingers flying across the keyboard or pointing on a touchscreen as the One True Way miss the point. I want my computing devices to support the kind of interaction I want to engage in, which differs from application to application and time to time.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
It's a fun quote. On the other hand, while no one should accuse Rand of being a good writer of fiction, I don't find what's depicted in Atlas Shrugged all that fantastical.
This quote would be more meaningful if Atlas Shrugged critics were able to actually criticize it, not the straw-man. Unfortunately, orcs didn’t show them how to do it.
For what it’s worth I read Lotr when I was 8 and atlas shrugged when I was 12. I’m must be stupid naive about the discourse over shrugged around here. The meta-story made sense to me as much as the hero journey of frodo(and gollum) made sense to me.
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
The beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...).
It is a good thing and it absolutely can function, but not as a society. Ayn Rand explicitly rejected this idea [1]:
Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to?
A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came up; only nothing came up among them, because they shared the same philosophy. . . . But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. . . . No one can guard rights, except a government under objective laws. . . . Rational men are not afraid of government. In a proper society, a rational man doesn’t have to know the government exists, because the laws are clear and he never breaks them. [FHF 72]
[1]: Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, Politics and Economics, Libertarianism and Anarchism
That's a real circular answer there, "it's not a society because it's not a society". Claiming that a place specifically set up as a self-contained community hiding from the government, and hiding from government authority, is 'just a private estate' is rhetorical nonsense.
I never said that it’s not society because it’s not a society. If you want me to derive the whole meaning from concepts, that’s a rationalist school’s method, not mine. I derive the meaning from the content: an example of (“optimistically”) one thousand people sharing the same philosophy does not endorse a government-less society.
I do agree that a private estate cannot exist in a society without government. But it is private estate in the sense that the members recognize it as such, and that it can exist in this very narrow context.
And just to point out that there is WinCompose, for Windows, and a somewhat janky but usable solution using Karabiner Elements and macos-compose for Mac.
I was present at the IFIP 1978 conference in Toronto where Dijkstra announced that personal computing was a dead end because most people don't know how to program.
There's an irony about the design of ALGOL 68. It was denounced at the time as being too big a language, with too many experimental features. In fact, the language in the Report is unimplementable, primarily because the lexical syntax is fanciful (there's an actual difference between the roman period and the italic period) and also abstract (so no two implementations actually have the same lexical syntax). I was on the periphery of an ALGOL 68 implementation project that foundered because the goal was to implement every conceivable edge case, include those that could never occur in practice, e.g., x[i] := x[...50 pages of code...] Yet very reasonable subsets (including ALGOL-68R and FLACC) were built. As for the language breadth, arguably C# is much broader, and I haven't heard anyone claim that it is a failure.
As for the Report...there was a time when I understood it cover to cover. But Lindsey and van der Meulen's Informal Introduction presented the whole language at a level understandable to anyone who understood ALGOL 60. van Wijngaarden did the language a terrible disservice when he forced (that is the correct word, I believe) the use of two-level grammars in order to ensure type correctness. Had the Report never existed, the language would have had much more traction.
The irony? Apart from the grossly-overengineered “transput” library—much better adapted to a unit-record and line printer world than our modern world—the one actual experimental feature in the language was the par clause, which provided parallel execution, and relied on semaphores for synchronization. Dijkstra's semaphores.
In the 1970s, I temporarily relocated from Vancouver to Boston. A few days after I arrived, someone said, “After work, I'm going to take the T [subway] to BC.” I was awed by the concept of a continental mass-transit system, but puzzled. It turns out that in the Massachusetts Bay area, BC is Boston College.
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