Viewing profile — DanWeinreb

I totally agree about the families. That's way, way over the line. IANAL so I don't know whether there are actually laws being broken here, but there might be; freedom of speech in…

There isn't any one "self-taught programmer" who can be characterized, so a lot of these comments are claiming to be more general than I think is fair. I have close friends who are…

About your last paragraph, I agree 100% All of that is more important than choice of language.

Peter, you imply that Python is better for, or more like, pseudo-code, but why is it better? In my opinion, it is better for most people because they were taught syntaxes more like…

A function definition is, in general, far away from the function call. If you think this problem is more severe for macros than for functions, then you should articulate why. You m…

At the International Lisp Conference last year, I put in an evening event called the "Great Macro Debate", in which these issues were discussed. (We encouraged humor, and flaming a…

Hello, my co-worker, whoever you are. Yes, Common Lisp should have dictionary literals. I don't know why there hasn't been a commonly-used reader macro for this. (Emacs Lisp mode a…

Oh, it's so ugly, and it hasn't been checked for mistakes, etc. I'd be embarrassed to have my name associated with it.

I agree. But if you find yourself with an employer who requires that everything be written one of a few languages, and Lisp isn't on the menu, I'd take Python over C++ in a heartbe…

I tried writing an extensive Common Lisp vs. Python paper (yes, I have seen all of the existing ones), but it got too big and out of hand. One of interesting developments in Python…

I guess so, but actually I don't think that Java and CLOS have such a different idea of what OOP means. They just have different specific features. CLOS has multimethods and multip…

It's true that when people learn object-oriented programming, and they learn about inheritance, they tend to think that inheritance is something you should be using heavily all ove…

Yes. That's why you want a multi-paradigm language, in which all of those methods of writing code are available. The trick is to figure out how to provide all of them in a way that…

Exactly. If your IDE can just generate it, then why is it needed at all? And, as I said, it makes the code harder to read. You have to look over all the boilerplate and see if it's…

I was one of the designers at BEA for four years. (BEA made WebLogic, a leading J2EE server.) Indeed, J2EE requires a lot of annoying boilerplate. Yes, you have to let the IDE hand…

C succeeded because it was the language of Unix, and it rode to success on Unix's success. C++ did indeed succeed because so many people knew C. Java has very little to do with C, …

That's an amusing idea, but it is not the case. I used Lisp extensively at the MIT AI Lab, at Symbolics (I was a founder), and now at ITA Software. The people worked together as te…