this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2021
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Do you want to pick a programming language for me, Lemmy? ๐Ÿฑโ€๐Ÿ’ป (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi, everyone

TL;DR - post below your suggestion for a good programming language for an almost-rookie teacher/educator/writer to start using.

More info: I am trying to decide on which programming language to learn. I know my way around HTML and CSS from being active online, but haven't done much programming apart from this. I write, teach, and work with digital teaching/learning products a lot. In 2021, I think there will be plenty of time for me to start working with programming. I don't mean just "learn to code" - I mean using the language(s) as an educator/writer/publisher. Libre / open source context preferred. Which languages look like they fit the bill, Lemmy?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

AFAIK, you /can/ use the parentheses as tags in XML, ... but it's okay if it's not for you!

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I think you mean SXML which is a variation of XML with S-Expressions.

But what I mean is writting Lisp like a XML tree which would be pretty similar to SXML for readability.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I actually haven't heard of SXML, so I meant regular lisp. For me, I just mean that this is pretty tree-based, so far as I can tell (I'm not an actual programmer, though, which might be the issue with my understanding):

(defun foo (bar baz)
  (if (predicate)
      (do if true)
    (do if false)))
[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

This is an XML tree:

This is an SXML tree compared with an XHTML (XML based HTML) tree:

SXML uses the standard S-Expressions syntax but what I expect is being able to use more this:

(*TOP* 
  (@ 
    (*NAMESPACES* 
      (x "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml")
    )
  )
  (x:html 
    (@ 
      (xml:lang "en") 
      (lang "en")
    )
    (x:head
       (x:title "An example page")
    )
    (x:body
      (x:h1 
        (@ 
          (id "greeting")
        ) 
        "Hi, there"
      )
      (x:p  "This is just an >>example<< to show XHTML & SXML.")
    )
  )
)

I think that most people liking Lisp don't want to change the current formatting standard and maybe most of them have eagle view or a good "mind parser" but it is more readable for me writing like this. I can identify errors easily and I don't have to count the parenthesis as I have been doing for reading Scheme and Lisp basic programs well.

I also combine this with tabulation of 4 characters instead of soft-tabs (real white spaces) of 2 characters like some people do due to the JS influence.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Oh, well if you just mean a formatting thing -- you can format a source file however you want :) But yeah, that's not really the popular way to do it. For me, just the opening tags + indentation work well enough to delimit everything, but to each their own.