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?

  • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    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.

    • acidwash jeans@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      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)))
      
      • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        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.

        • acidwash jeans@lemmy.ml
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          4 years ago

          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.