At least Hofstadter was successful at getting me interested in math beyond high school.
At least Hofstadter was successful at getting me interested in math beyond high school.
For some of us, we can just about handle the simple algebraic infix stuff, and we'll never make that leap to "my god, it's full of CARs".
This is categorically not the case.
Let me paraphrase my own post from Lobsters a year or two back:
I hypothesise that, genuinely, a large fraction of humanity simply lacks the mental flexibility to adapt to prefix or postfix notation.
Algebraic notation is, among ordinary people, almost a metonym for “complicated and hard to understand”. I suspect that most numerate people could not explain BODMAS precedence and don’t understand what subexpressions in brackets mean.
I have personally taught people to program who did not and could not understand the conceptual relationship between a fraction and a percentage. This abstraction was too hard for them.
Ordinary line-numbered BASIC is, I suspect, somewhere around the upper bound of cognitive complexity for billions of humans.
One reason for the success of languages with C syntax is that it’s the tersest form of algebraic notation that many people smart enough to program at all can handle.
Reorder the operators and you’ve just blown the minds of the majority of your target audience. Game over.
I admire Lisp hugely, but I am not a Lisp proponent.
I find it fascinating and the claims about it intrigue me, but to me, personally, I find it almost totally unreadable.
Those people I am talking about? I say this became I am one.
I myself am very firmly in the camp of those for whom simple algebraic infix notation is all I can follow. Personally, my favourite programming language is still BASIC.
Outside of expressions, those languages are essentially prefix in that the operator comes before the list of arguments.