Re: A Sugar Free Diet?

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@...>]

On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 3:59 PM, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Michael Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Syntax sugar is nice.  It makes syntax taste good.  Too much of it, however,
>> is "empty calories" which should be avoided in large quantities.
>
> The issue comes from a noun escaping from a technical phrase.
> "syntactical sugar" is conventional and doesn't carry too many
> connotations, certainly not as Roberto uses it, but sugar ... we have
> _all_ been told about sugar! [1]

Conventional indeed, the phrase is 50 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar

> [1] that Lisp guy who said "syntactical sugar causes cancer of the semi-colon" ?

That was Adam Perlis (first recipient of the Turing Award).

A few other quotes:

* "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."

* "Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but
nothing of interest is easy."

* "A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing."

* "In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our
programming languages."

* "You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can
write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can
program."

* "Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also
easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to
improve."

—Pierre-Yves