The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#1

Post by afurrysolver » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

The Roots of Lisp (2001)
paulgraham.com

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#2

Post by coder1001 » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:53 AM UTC

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background!

To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#3

Post by bsaul » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:59 AM UTC

Recently had a conversation on how functional programming and declarative programming were somewhat linked, and how i observed that languages that started to go down the functional road slowly tried to add more and more capabilities for DSLs, and then slowly moved toward becoming a lisp. But that was just my feeling.

is this theorized somewhere ? Or am i just dreaming ?

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#4

Post by fouc » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

coder1001 wrote: post #2

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background! To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

Yet some of the most successful business people seem to be good at tech. I heard that half of the CEOs of the top 500 fortune companies have a STEM degree.

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#5

Post by try_again » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #3

Recently had a conversation on how functional programming and declarative programming were somewhat linked, and how i observed that languages that started to go down the functional road slowly tried to add more and more capabilities for DSLs, and then slowly moved toward becoming a lisp. But that was just my feeling. is this theorized somewhere ? Or am i just dreaming ?

A well-known quote is that whoever doesn't understand Lisp is doomed to reinvent it: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2352

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#6

Post by Hendrikto » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 10:28 AM UTC

fouc wrote: post #4

coder1001 wrote: post #2

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background! To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

Yet some of the most successful business people seem to be good at tech. I heard that half of the CEOs of the top 500 fortune companies have a STEM degree.

My guess: STEM degrees require and foster critical thinking, logic, and abstraction skills, which are all very conducive to being a good business person.

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#7

Post by deepaksurti » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #3

Recently had a conversation on how functional programming and declarative programming were somewhat linked, and how i observed that languages that started to go down the functional road slowly tried to add more and more capabilities for DSLs, and then slowly moved toward becoming a lisp. But that was just my feeling. is this theorized somewhere ? Or am i just dreaming ?

Greenspun tenth rule may come into play here [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#8

Post by tromp » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

> In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry.

One could argue that Church's (1930s) lambda calculus, which underlies LISP, is a closer analogue to Euclid's distillation of the essence of Geometry.

With the minimal addition of pure binary IO, the lambda calculus is easily transformed into an untyped programming language [1]. On the other hand, full blown and richly typed pure functional programming languages like Haskell remain semantically faithful to their lambda calculus underpinnings.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/Binary_lambda_calculus.html

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#9

Post by terminaljunkid » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:16 PM UTC

IMO Lisp is just overrated, it lacks visual clues, reads right to left with horrible nesting etc..

Sure it has some good concepts. But fanboys on internet make it seem like some God tier thing.

Re: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

#10

Post by coldtea » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:19 PM UTC

coder1001 wrote: post #2

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background! To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

For some counter examples:

Bill Joy co-founded SUN - but also wrote ex, vi, the BSD UNIX tcp/ip stack, and other things.

Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic and Netscape - and is a famous VC person now (of Andreessen Horowitz fame).

Bill Gates, also very technical (wrote early MS programs, BASIC interpreters etc).

Eric Schmidt (ex Google CEO) wrote Lex (the lexer, now more known by its GNU port, flex) and was SUN's first programmer.