Comment by spacemanaki
15 years ago
I dunno, I don't really buy your squint test for languages. While it makes some sense for graphical user interfaces, (most) source code isn't graphical, it's textual, and you wouldn't apply the squint test to the arbitrary written word, would you? Where every page of every book looks the same...
It's true that I wouldn't apply it to prose, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for code, where you often want to look at lots of it and get a gist of what it's doing. Also I often do think of a programming language as a user interface, even if it's not actually made of buttons and icons.
I'm not claiming this is the main problem with Lisp; only that it's one of them.
Excluding books like novels which are written to be read from beginning to end, the easiest to skim-read books have chapter and section divisions, each with intro and concluding paragraphs. They have pictures, charts, and diagrams; they have margin notes summarizing each paragraph; they have color. Each paragraph has a topic sentence, either first or last. The book begins with contents on a single page, then a detailed contents. The written word's come a long way since scrolls were the writing medium.
I'd say the squint test does apply to the written word.