access VS Pluto.jl

I like https://github.com/AccelerationNet/access

I agree you can make arguments, I like your explanation for the final form further downthread. For the second form, another choice could be (.x foo) or (. foo x). Or if you're trying to write something like System.out.println("x"), Clojure's .. shows it could be written as (.. System out (println "x")). Or, if you're using CL, you can use the access library (https://github.com/AccelerationNet/access) and write things like #Dfoo.bar.bast or (with-dot () (do-thing whatever.thing another.thing)).

In trying to further steelman a case where random Lisp syntax can be more difficult to read than, say, equivalent Python, two other areas come to mind. First is the inside-outness order of operations thing, it trips people up sometimes. Like the famous "REPL" (with a bad printer) is just (loop (print (eval (read)))), but in English we want to see that as LPER. Solutions include things like the arrow macro (Clojure did good work on showcasing it and other simple macros that can resolve this issue in many places) and if you write/pull one into CL REPL becomes (-> (read) (eval) (print) (loop)), how nice to read. But even the ancient let/let* forms allow you to express a more linear version of something, and you can avoid some instances of the problem with just general programming taste on expression complexity (an issue with all languages -- https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-expression-complexity ).

The second area is on functions that have multiple exit points. A lot of Lispers seem to just not like return-from, and will convert things into cond expressions or similar or just say no to early-exits. The solution here I think comes from both ends, the first is a broader cultural norm spreading in other languages against functions with multiple return statements and getting used to code written that way, the other is to just not get so upset about return-from and use it when it makes the code nicer to read.

thanks. Do you know how your cl-getx differs from access? https://github.com/AccelerationNet/access It is a universal accessor with the option of nested look ups.

ps: related: how to access an element in all the lisp sequences, generically? I like access for that: https://github.com/AccelerationNet/access (and generic-cl

I thought that notebook based development and package based development were diametrically opposed in the past, but Pluto.jl notebooks have changed my mind about this.

A Pluto.jl notebook is a human readable Julia source file. The Pluto.jl package is itself developed via Pluto.jl notebooks.

https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

Also, the VSCode Julia plugin tooling has really expanded in functionality and usability for me in the past year. The integrated debugging took some work to setup, but is fast enough to drop into a local frame.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/julia

Julia is the first language I have achieved full life cycle integration between exploratory code to sharable package. It even runs quite well on my Android. 2023 is the first year I was able to solve a differential equation or render a 3D surface from a calculated mesh with the hardware in my pocket.

Re Julia there is also pluto.jl that is another notebook-like environment for julia. It's been a few years since I played with it but it looked cool, for example it handles state differently so you don't get into the same messes as with ipython notebooks. https://plutojl.org/

For this, Notebooks are often used. Julia offers a uniquely nice and interactive Pluto notebook for the web https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

I believe this is what Pluto sets out to do for Julia.

I used it as part of the “Computational Thinking” with Julia course a year or two back. Even then the beta software was very good and some of the demos the Pluto dev showed were nothing short of amazing

https://plutojl.org/

I think what you want is Pluto!

I like how Pluto.jl handles this:

> Pluto offers an environment where changed code takes effect instantly and where deleted code leaves no trace. Unlike Jupyter or Matlab, there is no mutable workspace, but rather, an important guarantee:

> At any instant, the program state is completely described by the code you see.

[1] https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl