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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Syntax is a funny thing. It seems that some developers (perhaps most) care about it (disclaimer: myself included) but there's a large number I've encountered who do not. It seems to be a subjective preferential thing, because most rational discussions I've attempted to have about it result in circling around a drain and coming to no conclusion. I'd say that they're simply blind to it (similar to how a colorblind person can't tell when their clothing color choices just "look wrong"), but they could (perhaps justifiably) argue that they're simply agnostic to it. It's just an aspect of a language that they don't care about and which doesn't influence whether they wish to work with the language or not.

... I'm not like that. I took one look at Elixir and said "HOLY CRAP IT'S A FUNCTIONAL SCALEABLE RUBY!" (of course that was merely scratching the surface, but...)

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I tried translating some of the book "The Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang" into LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang), and Elxir (somebody's done this already I believe).

Robert Virding, a co-creator of Erlang, creator of LFE, also wrote Luerl - Lua implemented in Erlang.

So if syntax is important you have many choices to use the BEAM VM/OTP in a Ruby-like language (Elixr), a Lisp (LFE) or in Lua (Luerl)!

I am now looking at Robert's videos of a game whose logic is written Lua, but it runs an Erlang process for each ship of thousands he spawns in the demo. Pretty cool. There's even Torchcraft - Luerl and Torch ML for learning AI/ML in Starcraft.

I still prefer LFE because I like Lisp syntax, biased as yourself about such things, however, I still think Elixir macros are not as far reaching as LFE's since they are handled after parsing in Elixir vs. LFE [1], although I wouldn't mind being proved incorrect on this.

  [1]  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lisp-flavoured-erlang/ensAkzcEDQQ

How far did you get with the "Neuroevolution Through Erlang" book? I happen to own it (there must be like 10 of us!) but haven't gotten around to it yet...

I am more than a third of the way through. I got distracted, and need to pick it up again. I like the writing style, and that if focuses on TWEANNs and practical examples rather than broad ML. I like the BEAM/OTP but Erlang syntax rubs me the wrong way. I've tried Elixir and LFE, and now I might try Luerl. Not enough time in the day...

For note, luerl is more of a library for erlang/elixir/BEAM and not a full language, as it is basically just lua's interpreter rewritten in erlang with some modifications to make it fit the system a bit better than normal Lua (there is normal Lua available via a Port though).

Syntax (and to some extent, expressiveness/conciseness) is superficial. How the code feels under change matters more.

I feel they both matter (and more specifically I don't think a well-thought-out syntax is merely superficial), but as this is just a feeling with an anecdotal datapoint of quantity 1, and there being a dearth of evidence for or against "good" syntax (highly subjective, of course)... we're probably at an impasse lol

> Syntax (and to some extent, expressiveness/conciseness) is superficial

I think this kind of attitude is unhelpful at best, and alienating at worst. There are a ton of "serious" programmers, myself included, who care quite deeply about the enjoyableness of the tools we use, and aesthetic/expressive qualities absolutely come into that.

I believe the recent popularity of elixir kind of proves the case. There are many improvements to the package managers & tooling, etc, but the most obvious is to the syntax - which transforms what previously seemed unapproachable into a genuine option. Dismissing any and all such interest as merely "superficial" seems uncharitable, to say the least.

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