On Getting Older in Tech • Hacker News Board

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#391

Post by bbcbasic » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:21 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #373

kazinator wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some functional languages make certain behaviors implicit, such as partial evaluation and laziness. However, these work better if they are explicit. They work better because one of the two is severely confusing when implicit and the other potentially performs badly. C:\Users\kaz>txr This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 162. Use the :quit command or type Ctrl-D on empty line to exit. 1> (defstruct integers…

> Why would I want implicit laziness everywhere? For the same reason you want automatic memory management: so you can fob off the job of figuring out where the thunks should go onto the compiler, just as you fob off the job of figuring out where the calls to malloc and free should go. At least that's the theory. It seems plausible to me. I think it's an open question whether my failure to grok Haskell is due to a pro…

Failure to grok Haskell is probably due to the lack of easy accessible literature on it. Plus with so few other people groking it there isn't as much osmosis available.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#392

Post by bbcbasic » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:22 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #380

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to troll you here... To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? The forced purity may make Haskell a very different language. And, to return to your original complaint: If you dislike new languages, I bet XML drives you straight up the wall...

> To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? It depends on what I'm doing, but I generally write in an OO style more than a functional style. Real problems have state. > If you dislike new languages I want to be clear that this is just a general observation. I don't dislike new things because they are new, I tend to dislike them because they are generally bad . But they are not all bad.…

Pure FP deals with state!

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#393

Post by kazinator » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:27 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #380

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to troll you here... To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? The forced purity may make Haskell a very different language. And, to return to your original complaint: If you dislike new languages, I bet XML drives you straight up the wall...

> To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? It depends on what I'm doing, but I generally write in an OO style more than a functional style. Real problems have state. > If you dislike new languages I want to be clear that this is just a general observation. I don't dislike new things because they are new, I tend to dislike them because they are generally bad . But they are not all bad.…

I dislike XML because it's a nested tree of internal nodes and typeless character string leaves.

In XML I have no way to place "255" and "FF" in such a way that XML understands them to be the same object, of integer type.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#394

Post by kazinator » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:28 AM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #392

lisper wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? It depends on what I'm doing, but I generally write in an OO style more than a functional style. Real problems have state. > If you dislike new languages I want to be clear that this is just a general observation. I don't dislike new things because they are new, I tend to dislike them because they are generally bad . But they are not all bad.…

Pure FP deals with state!

State is something that is best just embraced rather than "dealt with".

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#395

Post by lisper » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:31 AM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #392

lisper wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? It depends on what I'm doing, but I generally write in an OO style more than a functional style. Real problems have state. > If you dislike new languages I want to be clear that this is just a general observation. I don't dislike new things because they are new, I tend to dislike them because they are generally bad . But they are not all bad.…

Pure FP deals with state!

Sure, everything non-trivial is Turing-complete. But FP begins as a stateless paradigm and then tacks on state as a sort of a kludge while all the while seeming to be a little embarrassed about it, while OO embraces state from the beginning as part and parcel of the mental model that it endorses. I find the OO model has a better impedance match to my brain and the real world. Reasonable people can (and do!) disagree.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#396

Post by lisper » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:36 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #393

lisper wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To what degree do you use Lisp as an FP language? As a pure FP language? It depends on what I'm doing, but I generally write in an OO style more than a functional style. Real problems have state. > If you dislike new languages I want to be clear that this is just a general observation. I don't dislike new things because they are new, I tend to dislike them because they are generally bad . But they are not all bad.…

I dislike XML because it's a nested tree of internal nodes and typeless character string leaves. In XML I have no way to place "255" and "FF" in such a way that XML understands them to be the same object, of integer type.

Sure you do. 255 FF

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#397

Post by vorg » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:42 AM UTC

> between 2008 and 2010, I was training Java developers at Circuit City on Groovy and Grails. These folk were mostly late 20s and early 30s, and they were just fine sticking with good-old, write-everything-yourself, don’t-bother-with-frameworks, Java.

You're assuming Groovy and Grails are better to code in than Java and something like Spring. Grails began as a thin wrapper around Spring. Its business purpose was to chisel market share away from vanilla Spring so its backing company (G2One) would get bought by SpringSource, which eventually happened in late 2008.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#398

Post by zoom6628 » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 9:04 AM UTC

Im closing in on 54. Having an absolute blast in tech now because i bring 4 decades of coding, life, and a number of different jobs to what i do today. And I devote every morning first thing to reading and learning something new - python, azure databases, IPC in C#, C and SBCs, ZigBee. There is so much out there at a price point that makes learning painless and fun.

In life i stay healthy as a vegetarian and practice yoga. Look after the body and the mind will largely follow suit but feed the mind with challenges daily and you will notice that you get better over time at a rate the javascript kiddies cant comprehend.

Maybe this ageism is jealousy from the kiddies because you think leagues ahead of them, and also jealousy from old managers who cant do anything productive now that their body of knowledge is no longer useful? Food for thought, for someone. I wont be wasting any time to think about it.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#399

Post by bbcbasic » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 9:19 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #394

bbcbasic wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure FP deals with state!

State is something that is best just embraced rather than "dealt with".

An analogy to that is that OO doesn't embrace IO. Yet weirdly enough that makes OO-IO better than older languages that have built in commands to write to disk.

Haskell doesn't have state but you have multiple models to choose from, from simple folds to STM or State or Reader or Writer Monads all of which serve different purposes and do different jobs well.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#400

Post by cronjobber » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 10:35 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #351

lisper wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not cheeky, it's a perfectly fair question. Yes, that is certainly possible. And there have been a few cool new ideas that have come along that are not easily subsumed by CL, like Haskell's type system. It's easy to implement Hindley-Milner, but actually using that information to inform the compiler, plus adding laziness as a core language feature, is much harder. But I think the jury is still very much out on…

Some functional languages make certain behaviors implicit, such as partial evaluation and laziness. However, these work better if they are explicit. They work better because one of the two is severely confusing when implicit and the other potentially performs badly. C:\Users\kaz>txr This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 162. Use the :quit command or type Ctrl-D on empty line to exit. 1> (defstruct integers…

> Why would I want implicit laziness everywhere?

Modularity; see the stone age paper discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129540

> Functional programming languages provide two new kinds of glue - higher-order functions and lazy evaluation. Using these glues one can modularise programs in new and exciting ways, and we’ve shown many examples of this.

> This paper provides further evidence that lazy evaluation is too important to be relegated to second-class citizenship. It is perhaps the most powerful glue functional programmers possess.