Hi, everyone
TL;DR - post below your suggestion for a good programming language for an almost-rookie teacher/educator/writer to start using.
More info: I am trying to decide on which programming language to learn. I know my way around HTML and CSS from being active online, but haven’t done much programming apart from this. I write, teach, and work with digital teaching/learning products a lot. In 2021, I think there will be plenty of time for me to start working with programming. I don’t mean just “learn to code” - I mean using the language(s) as an educator/writer/publisher. Libre / open source context preferred. Which languages look like they fit the bill, Lemmy?
If I can use the parenthesis in the way that keys or tags in XML are used (as true trees) then I will accept it.
However, this is not common nor the standard way which make examples harder to help with learning.
AFAIK, you /can/ use the parentheses as tags in XML, … but it’s okay if it’s not for you!
I think you mean SXML which is a variation of XML with S-Expressions.
But what I mean is writting Lisp like a XML tree which would be pretty similar to SXML for readability.
I actually haven’t heard of SXML, so I meant regular lisp. For me, I just mean that this is pretty tree-based, so far as I can tell (I’m not an actual programmer, though, which might be the issue with my understanding):
(defun foo (bar baz) (if (predicate) (do if true) (do if false)))
This is an XML tree:
This is an SXML tree compared with an XHTML (XML based HTML) tree:
SXML uses the standard S-Expressions syntax but what I expect is being able to use more this:
(*TOP* (@ (*NAMESPACES* (x "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml") ) ) (x:html (@ (xml:lang "en") (lang "en") ) (x:head (x:title "An example page") ) (x:body (x:h1 (@ (id "greeting") ) "Hi, there" ) (x:p "This is just an >>example<< to show XHTML & SXML.") ) ) )
I think that most people liking Lisp don’t want to change the current formatting standard and maybe most of them have eagle view or a good “mind parser” but it is more readable for me writing like this. I can identify errors easily and I don’t have to count the parenthesis as I have been doing for reading Scheme and Lisp basic programs well.
I also combine this with tabulation of 4 characters instead of soft-tabs (real white spaces) of 2 characters like some people do due to the JS influence.
Oh, well if you just mean a formatting thing – you can format a source file however you want :) But yeah, that’s not really the popular way to do it. For me, just the opening tags + indentation work well enough to delimit everything, but to each their own.
:3