I don't particularly like the syntax, I find it really hard to mentally "parse" the program and I wonder what's the takeaway from someone who can't already say "hey, they're trying to teach for-loops here". It's almost the opposite approach as the legendary SICP.
Also, by the love of god, disable that freaking popup. IT. LOADS. ON. EVERY. PAGE. 100,000th visitor? Seriously? Is this time-travel spam from 2002?
It's fine to be critical but can you please not do it like this? I love SICP too, but snarky putdowns are not a fair way to treat anyone's work, and when you do it this way, you're patterning the community on behaving this way—which unfortunately the internet is already wont to do. If we don't want a toxic culture, we all need to work at it.
Also, "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."
Appreciated—and I believe you of course. The trouble, as you know, is that intent doesn't communicate itself very well on the internet. Objects in the rear-view mirror are snarkier than they appear, or something like that.
The forum thread is such an intimate conversational genre that we're all inclined to wing it in the comments (and so we should), and at the same time it's common for people to see their own work discussed here, plus HN threads tend to rank high in search results, so the impact can go far beyond the room.
I don't particularly like the syntax, I find it really hard to mentally "parse" the program and I wonder what's the takeaway from someone who can't already say "hey, they're trying to teach for-loops here". It's almost the opposite approach as the legendary SICP.
Also, by the love of god, disable that freaking popup. IT. LOADS. ON. EVERY. PAGE. 100,000th visitor? Seriously? Is this time-travel spam from 2002?