Viewing profile — kennethtilton

Hey, thanks ruling out the 60s as too old even to consider. :) I think anyone who is a seat-filler has a problem. But if one codes for fun, if one sees new technology and just DLs …

Your exercise may be the take-off point. You sound like you know how to code. Can you talk a little more about how the algorithm you were confronting made the effort of getting a S…

Maybe somewhere in between. The imperfections are so small that even a modest effort would never get undertaken. Something folks need to realize is that Lisp truly is a metalanguag…

Good gosh, no. For example, I am with Einstein: make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. ie, There is a right amount of everything. I guess I am also with Goldilocks,…

My first thought was that the question cannot be answered without knowing what we must fail at inevitably for life to be futile. I looked up futile to be sure: "incapable of produc…

Exactly. We Common Lispers created Clojure as a firewall when we realized The Great Unwashed were headed our way. Seems to be working.

"CL is an abject disaster"? I need a red card over here.

Nonsense. The standards process is a beast, so no one is going to kick it off for anything other than a good solid rethink. As others have noted, the language and spec are done, ak…

...because it was a bad idea. I did some serious work with a Lisp-1 (Arc) and it was a PITA with no discernible win to it.

Thanks, your query led to my belated discovery of http://cs.stanford.edu/jmc And this: http://library.stanford.edu/collections/john-mccarthy-papers... Agreed, tho, the links should…

ps. Have him take a crack at protein-folding so he does not get bored.

First: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Then, once he is frothing at the mouth: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ Then for the love of god protect him from Emacs: http://www.fr…

Unfortunately the URL prolly requires a subscription, but if you can get a free trial give it a shot if only for a lesson I see in application design: Visicalc worked exactly like …

I was just about to code an IF and used COND instead, even with the extra parens, and thought about Arc and the principle I recall Mr. Graham stating rather unequivocally (hope I g…

The interesting thing to this old fart as a newcomer to HN is that it really does not make much difference whether or not he is a troll. Unless of course he opens that PayPal accou…

Where's the beef? If it is a Web design company, web prefab is an issue because that's their beef. If the company sells something else and the site looks/works great, I would only …

I pulled out of my dive before going broke, but not by much. Licked my wounds, got a job, built up my savings for three years and now can try again, this time much wiser (and less …

Sold or just first serious app? Sold would be Mastermind for the Apple II. Integer Basic. Made a few hundred bucks. Even in 1979 that was not a lot.

It was a long time ago, but I used a golf scoring gadget to keep count of my daily driving excesses. Counting a behavior changes it. The awareness broke the habit. Improvements of …

A double shot of espresso is great, I have a million ideas all at once and am juiced to do it all. I get absolutely nothing done until it wears off and then I need a nap. hth.

We had someone do amazing work for just a couple of months and it was disappointing to lose him to a start-up but we appreciated the two months of output. But that would be the exc…

You did not include one iota of information about the "awesome new" language, let alone a link to it. If you have that little interest in this alleged language, I do not think the …

Oh. They actually want to step up their testing game? So why this thread? btw, I am glad no one asked the alternative to testing -- it would have been more a textbook on software d…

I hear a lot of talk about agile these days but it all looks like waterfall to me. The development and QA teams need to do whatever it takes to support the business, including deal…

Reading between the lines, you should be quite nervous about ending up living in a van down by the river (thank you, Chris Farley, rip) and you should forget completely about takin…