L Rudolf L comments on Review: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

[L Rudolf L]

This is an interesting point, I haven’t thought about the relation to SVO/​etc. before! I wonder whether SVO/​SOV dominance is a historical quirk, or if the human brain actually is optimized for those.

The verb-first emphasis of prefix notation like in classic Lisp is clearly backwards sometimes. Parsing this has high mental overhead relative to what it’s expressing:

(reduce +
        (filter even?
               (take 100 fibonacci-numbers)))

I freely admit this is more readable:

fibonacci-numbers.take(100).filter(is_even).reduce(plus)

Clojure, a modern Lisp dialect, solves this with threading macros. The idea is that you can write

(->> fibonacci-numbers
     (take 100)
     (filter even?)
     (reduce +))

and in the expressions after ->> the previous expression gets substituted as the last argument to the next.

Thanks to the Lisp macro system, you can write a threading macro even in a Lisp that doesn’t have it (and I know that for example in Racket you can import a threading macro package even though it’s not part of the core language).

As for God speaking in Lisp, we know that He at least writes it: https://​​youtu.be/​​5-OjTPj7K54