Alfred North Whitehead on notation[1]:

"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

"Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that...the whole population of Western Europe...could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers....

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism...that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle---they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

That being said, the proper notation is very problem-dependent.

[1] http://introtologic.info/AboutLogicsite/whitehead%20Good%20N...

Thanks -- I had seen this quotation but forgotten the source. It is even better than I remembered.

I keep having to look it up, and it's a devil to find.

> Any language that lets you spend your brainpower on the essence of the problem is a tremendous advantage and joy. This unlocks creativity and productivity.

For some reason the only language that let me reach this level is Python. I tried Clojure and Common Lisp, but for some reason I could never be as efficient as I wanted with them, which I think is a shame because in some ways I think the Lisps are superior to Python (due to the "code is data and data is code" of Lisp).

I really like Python, and use it on a daily basis but I found that after enough experience in Clojure, I prefer it when I have the choice and there isn't a compelling reason to use Python instead.

This isn't a criticism by the way, I do understand that people have different preferences of language idioms, and I do occasionally find myself scratching my head about the idiomatic Clojure way to solve a problem that wouldn't have been so hard for me in Python.

While I don't think Python is a bad language at all, it has some limitation that I am becoming more and more being aware of them - lack of static typing, limitation of lambdas, speed is an issue sometimes, but on the other hand it's very easy for me to be productive in it.

I am pretty sure that its lack of features is making Python easier to "master" (I don't claim to master it, just that I am more productive with it), but this lack can be limiting sometimes, so I am trying to find a solution to have both power and proficiency.

I use Clojure a lot, and did more Python in the past. Whenever I come back to Python, I am frustrated by being unable to remember what's a plain old function and what's a method, and the differences defining functions vs classes and methods etc..

In Clojure I know it's always (except for interop) just functions on values. Some functions dispatch to an implementation based on the type of the value, as is the case with multimethods and protocols, but it's still always just function calls from my point of view while writing the code.

Objects in Python little more than glorified namespaces. I always think of methods as a function that gets the namespace where it was declared as the first argument. Yes, there is the inheritance thing, but in Python it is just a mechanism to organize code.

In general, Python method is just combination of function object and pointer to "self" namespace.

I'd like to know if it's done differently in other languages. In my view, methods are curried function over self with a '.' syntactic shortcut.

Lua does not do the currying bit, but it does a lot less OOP and a lot more "dictionaries with stuff that can do something like prototype OOP if you squint hard enough". Java and whatnot just don't let you really use methods as first class citizens, so it doesn't matter.

IIRC under the hood Java will 'evaluate' the methods body as a sophisticated function with 'this' in its environment.

That's pretty much how I view them as well.

Great then.

"code is data and data is code" has a name: homoiconicity.

True, somehow I forgot the name of that concept.

Could you tell us more about what you ended up missing from Python ? is it syntax ? concepts ? libraries ?

It's nothing I miss, it's just that I couldn't keep in my head all the standard way to do things in Clojure/CL. I kept wondering "oh, how do I check if an element is a member of a list in Clojure, again?", or "ok, so I need to put this Sexpr out of this parenthesis, so with paredit I need to do C-right or C-left?", etc.

I plan to give Clojure and CL another shot in the future, but for now I am just lack of proficiency with them (I think I wrote about 1k loc in those language, including 4Clojure and project Euler, and some mock projects I tried to do but gave up).

Ok so only a matter of habits then.

To be a language means to be a way of defining thoughts in order to have them delivered to another.

With no constraints you could just write random rubbish (a bit like this). With the constraints of Java or C# you write code which does it's job, however a lot of work is in fitting your thoughts within the extensive syntax of the languages' constraints.

Clojure, or any other Lisp, helps in that the initial constraints it imposes are simple ().

Once you get a feel for the simplicity you get the feel for the power it brings.

It's a bit like wingtsun kung fu. Your brain is no way fast enough to react to your opponent fast enough to decide for example is this a hard punch or a soft punch. By that point the punch would have been received, restricting your thinking further. However if your body knows the language of wingtsun there is no thinking involved. Period.

Your body knows the language of interacting with another body so leaving your mind the time to make decisions. Your body has embraced the language and can rely on it to keep you alive whilst giving your mind the freedom (time) to make decisions or ultimate kill moves or be creative.

Another word for decisions is creativity. The cost of creativity is time. So embrace your language and be creative with your thoughts given the time your language allows. If you feel your language is asking for help unrelated to your problem then either you don't understand your language or the language is not a language at all and maybe another is better for the current context.

To sum this range in rubbish clojure:

(if (total-time > time-spent-defining-problem) (ask-where-this-time-went total-time time-spent-defining problem) :you-are-at-one-with-your-language-and-in-flow-my-friend)

Or think about:

(def time (apply + allthetimesyouspentdefiningclasseswhenallyouwantedwasafunction))

End of drunken rant.

> Any language that lets you spend your brainpower on the essence of the problem is a tremendous advantage and joy. This unlocks creativity and productivity.

Isn't that the huge advantage of having a compiler? I can let it worry about whether I connected function input/output correctly and only care about what the function itself is doing.