
David Moon's Programming Language for Old Timers - sctb
http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/
======
gruseom
Wow, this is interesting on many levels. The slides from ILC are a good
overview: <http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/Moon-ILC09.pdf>. They contain
this fascinating statement:

 _Traditionally, code walking has required ad hoc code to understand every
“special form.” It is better to have a well-defined, object-oriented interface
to the Abstract Syntax Tree, scopes, and definitions. This is why objects are
better than S-expressions as a representation for program source code._

I have never heard anyone point to s-expressions as the reason code walkers
are hard to write in Lisp (and they are, at least in CL).

------
Hexstream
From the intro:

"PLOT sports a more conventional-looking syntax than classic Lisp."

Must... not... dismiss out-of-hand!

(Historically, attempts to give Lisp a more conventional syntax have been made
of fail)

~~~
lincolnq
This is true. But David Moon is fairly famous, having worked on Lisp, CLOS,
Dylan (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Moon>) and he was immortalized in
the hacker koan:

(From <http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html>)

 __ _One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a
better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to
each of the cons." Moon patiently told the student the following story:

"One day a student came to Moon and said, 'I understand how to make a better
garbage collector...'"_ __

So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. ;-)

edit: fixed typo in quote

~~~
mahmud
Tietelman was also famous and ran his own Lisp machine company, InterLisp, and
probably had wads of cash and the social clout to push whatever he wanted. His
Lisp with English-like syntax had a Futile And Ill Life.

------
scott_s
I'm glad this made its way onto the main page. I suppose timing and headlines
matter more than I thought: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530710>

~~~
nostrademons
Should've known that putting "David Moon" in the title here will get you at
least twice as many votes...which will get you more votes in turn...

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msie
Indentation is meaningful just like in Python:

"There are two special considerations for newlines in the syntax. The purpose
of this is to allow nesting structure to be indicated by indentation rather
than by any kind of explicit bracketing."

------
calambrac
Is there an implementation available anywhere to play with? Or is this still
in the design and discussion phase? I'd love to play around with this, it
seems like a clear, solid distillation of a lot of ideas.

~~~
joubert
When David presented this during the ILC last week at MIT, he said this is
simply a hobby and experiment and that he doesn't have plans to release an
implementation.

~~~
jrockway
He also said that if someone wants to implement it, they should. He just
doesn't want to be that someone, since he can't spend enough time on it to get
it right.

