by TedWalther » Thu Aug 14, 2014 12:39 am
The thing I like the most about newLISP is that it has the least amount of "surprise" compared to other Lisps. And my ideas of "surprise" come from my C/shell/Unix background.
So, with the recent addition to the get-string function, I found myself again "surprised"... because the "chunk" size changes if you put the magic values of '\000\000' or '\000\000\000\000' in as delimiters. I feel like the less surprising thing would be to have get-bytes be raw data, and get-string be for getting strings of characters, no matter what the format.
Principle of Least Surprise. Makes my head feel clear and powerful.
Lately, I find myself getting more and more surprised. Every surprise means a gotcha, means yet another bit of state to hold in my head when programming.
Cavemen in bearskins invaded the ivory towers of Artificial Intelligence. Nine months later, they left with a baby named newLISP. The women of the ivory towers wept and wailed. "Abomination!" they cried.