Reading Kafka in german is so much more modern and musical than in english or any other language. Kafka in english sounds almost sentimental, less modern. At least thats my feeling. In english translators often break his long paragraphs and sentences. Samuel Beckett said that he used to read most of Kafka in german, especially the Castle - Das Schloß.
I once had the unusual task of helping to translate a lengthy set of requirement specification documents for a migration between to ERP systems from German to English.
My overall impression is that German lends itself far easier to lengthy, nested, convoluted sentences. You can build long sentences in English, too, but their structure tends to be ... flatter?
So in translating, I would often break up monstrous monolithic sentences ("Bandwurmsatz", as we say in German) into several shorter ones.
It is different, I guess, when translating literature, but translating literature is probably really, really hard anyway. So try to have pity on those poor people who had to translate Kafka.
I generally prefer to read literature in its original language, but English is the only foreign language I know well enough to do that... :(
This is a classic:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Also check his open code lisp section!
I would like to add as somebody whose first language was lisp, car/cdr never represented a problem. It looks more balanced than first/rest.
The thing that got me were emacs, SICP lectures and the whole idea of lisp writing lisp. I don't think changing syntax would help much because lisp attracts certain types of people (I believe).
I had not heard of Fortress before. It seems that Oracle's sponsorship of the project ended in 2012. Guy Steele emphasizes the difficulty of implementing Fortress's type system on virtual machines. [1]
As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros)
started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to
music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm:
development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc..
The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure
python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from.
Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me
define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart
read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though.
The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships
in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))
