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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#401

Post by dragandj »

jodrellblank wrote: post #355
dragandj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are writing this comment in the lisp-based software. Yeah, I know, Hacker news is a simple software and could have been written in anything else, but, somehow, the author, who I've heard is very smart, thought that Lisp is the best pick.

And his secret to winning big was "write lisp software, have it bought out by another company who will rewrite it in a different language to make it popular and useful". Really, if PG's "LISP, how to win big" was as compelling and important as he tried to state in that essay, every ycombinator company would be using LISP for their secret advantage over other companies. Applicants would choose LISP because it's "bette…

Your logic assumes that young founders/developers are very proficient in many languages (including lisp) and they have perfect information for choosing. In reality, they use whatever crap they picked up hacking in high school. On top of that, the tools are only a part of the ingredients. However bad your platform is, at least it works, while most of the screw-up is hidden in business decisions - that's why every startup incubator's job is to help the youngsters not screw up business-wise. Tech is normally something up to the founders, most of whom have never heard of lisp.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#403

Post by allenbrunson »

lisper wrote: post #140
lukego wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erlang, Haskell, assembler, C, etc. Confirmation bias makes it easy to bind those variables to values that make one's own favorite language obviously the best and everybody else's infuriatingly, irrationally terrible. If unchecked then this leads to wildly false c…

What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.) This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.

that should be pretty obvious: lack of library support.

there is the famous example of the reddit founders, who believed pg's lisp story, and built the first version of their site with it. it went so badly for them that they had to start over again in python.

... but i bet you are going to have a very plausible-sounding reason why it didn't work for them.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#404

Post by lisper »

allenbrunson wrote: post #403
lisper wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.) This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.

that should be pretty obvious: lack of library support. there is the famous example of the reddit founders, who believed pg's lisp story, and built the first version of their site with it. it went so badly for them that they had to start over again in python. ... but i bet you are going to have a very plausible-sounding reason why it didn't work for them.

I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#405

Post by allenbrunson »

lisper wrote: post #404
allenbrunson wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that should be pretty obvious: lack of library support. there is the famous example of the reddit founders, who believed pg's lisp story, and built the first version of their site with it. it went so badly for them that they had to start over again in python. ... but i bet you are going to have a very plausible-sounding reason why it didn't work for them.

I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.

okay, maybe i betrayed my biases there too much, but, i agree with everybody else: if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software.

plenty of other tech has come from up nothing in the last few decades, to wide adoption, and big successes. the fact that lisp hasn't is, in my mind, prima facie evidence that it is not nearly as great as its proponents claim.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#406

Post by heymijo »

johnwheeler wrote: post #336
heymijo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever get asked about this? e.g. what you don't do anymore as a result of learning from experience Either in your current role / in interviews / on the street?

not that i can recall. why do you ask?

It seems like you have learned a tremendous amount throughout your career that others could benefit from, that's why! Not learning from you flies in the face of wisdom (1)(2).

I'm not afraid to generalize this either. I see so many people and organizations repeating the same mistakes, of their own, and of others', over and over. I envision an organization built around the idea of learning from others' experience. It's a near mythical creature, but it could run circles around its peers, who would doggedly pursue finding out its "secret" and promptly discounting it when they hear "learn from others' experience / history."

This turned into a mini-rant, but it's because I am incredulous that you and others like you have learned so much yet the potential of that knowledge is so rarely tapped into.

(1)“Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.” ― Otto von Bismarck (2) Why Don't We Learn from History by B.H. Liddell Hart https://www.amazon.com/Why-Dont-We-Learn-History/dp/09850811...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#407

Post by kazinator »

bbcbasic wrote: post #399
kazinator wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OOP absolutely embraces I/O. I/O begs to be OOP and makes, hands down, the best use case for illustrating OOP.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#408

Post by kazinator »

cronjobber wrote: post #400
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? 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 la…

The paper claims in its conclusion that it has provided evidence (what is more, "further evidence") yet I can't find any in there.

It argues that you can achieve a certain useful separation between programs together when one produces data for the other.

This can be achieved in a very satisfactory way with explicit streams (i.e. lazy lists). It can be satisfied with delimited closures, coroutines, threads and often with lexical closures. Not to mention Icon-style generators.

Lazy lists can be incorporated into the language so that their cell are first-class objects and substitute for regular eager cells smoothly. (Thank you, OOP).

The paper is actually wrong there, because laziness alone will not provide the kind of separation that g can begin executing, such that f then only executes when an item is required. Not for an arbitrary f! Suppose f traverses a graph structure recursively and yields some interesting items. Lazy eval alone isn't going to allow the f traversal to behave as a coroutine controlled by g, proceeding only as far as g continues to be interested in further items. The author is attributing to lazy evaluation magical powers that it doesn't have.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#410

Post by rifung »

mathgenius wrote: post #402
rifung wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did! Why do you ask?

You left the ending off your story! Nice ending too.

Haha! I didn't feel it was relevant to the comment but thank you! I'd rather be a math genius though! Maybe one day I'll be able to at least study some more math
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