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Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

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Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#1
The speaker summarizes Paul Graham's theories on Lisp and startups with the following statement:

"Skilled programmers can write better programmers than they can hire"

I really enjoyed watching the whole video. Very interesting stuff. Highly recommended.

Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]
mwrc2008.confreaks.com

Re: Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#2
Pretty awesome how tons of really smart people just won't get over their fear of parentheses even when they know the power that's behind them.

As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.

Re: Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#4

Pretty awesome how tons of really smart people just won't get over their fear of parentheses even when they know the power that's behind them. As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.

A quick disclaimer: I'm really a Lisp / Scheme noob, but I'm learning them both for academic purposes.

That being said, at first the parens bugged me a little bit, but as I got to developing more applications, the more I really grew to LOVE the parens. To me, they introduce a certain purity to the programs that I write; it's like every s-expr is a single thought and every function is a train of thinking. Beyond that, an additional benefit that I've found is that I can hold MUCH more of a program in my head when they're organized this way. I think it has to do with the chunking theory of memory - I don't have to remember the particulars of each chunk; just what each chunk did.

Anyways, it's a big enough attraction to me now that I regret not having them available in my day-to-day languages.

Re: Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#5
It was amazing when they showed a shot of the audience. A quick count revealed 17 macs, and 1 machine that I don't think was a mac, although it may have been a black macbook.

I didn't realize macbooks had become so pervasive in the ruby world.

Re: Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#7
post #4

Pretty awesome how tons of really smart people just won't get over their fear of parentheses even when they know the power that's behind them. As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.

A quick disclaimer: I'm really a Lisp / Scheme noob, but I'm learning them both for academic purposes. That being said, at first the parens bugged me a little bit, but as I got to developing more applications, the more I really grew to LOVE the parens. To me, they introduce a certain purity to the programs that I write; it's like every s-expr is a single thought and every function is a train of thinking. Beyond that,…

Yes, parentheses are beautiful. I don't actually like to look at code without them anymore.

Re: Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]

#9
Is Giles saying that with the help of Rubinius you can do Lisp-style code generation in Ruby? I don't know much about Rubinius but this doesn't sound right. Lisp macros let you manipulate the program's AST in compile time very easily because the AST is made of sexp's, just like the program code itself. This is due to the peculiar Lisp syntax. Lisp code generation seems quite different from the monkey patching techniques demonstrated in the presentation. Am I missing something?
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