Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius" • Hacker News Board

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#11

Post by 6ren » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:25 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #5

agentultra wrote: post #3

A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much? (or vice versa, has a fellow lisper found your code hard to understand)

I wonder if the flexibility and power of lisp might work against co-operation in this way too.

I've witnessed confusion caused by operator-overloading in C++ (I heard that that's common); lisp is more customizable.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#12

Post by GrooveStomp » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:26 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #9

Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim: There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case. Extraordinary deve…

Actually, the author pretty much explicitly states that he's not one of those geniuses.

"That still leaves open the possibility that I'm just freakin' brilliant, I could have (and would have) produced the same results in any old programming language. But there is actual data to refute that theory."

However, instead of invalidating his argument, he uses this to illustrate why Lisp is largely responsible for his success and why you don't have to be a genius to be attracted to Lisp or to benefit from using it.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#13

Post by crpatino » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:35 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #5

agentultra wrote: post #3

A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

Team players go off and use Python? Who would have thought!!!

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#14

Post by kenjackson » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:38 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #5

agentultra wrote: post #3

A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

Lisp has this convenient nature that it is better than every language, yet under its own weight it has nothing to show for it.

Maybe I can start a similar myth with Logo. It requires no proof. Simply one or two anecdotes, great hubris, and the ability to say with a straight face that the reason why everyone who uses it isn't productive is because we're geniuses. Anyone else in?

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#15

Post by lisper » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:46 PM UTC

6ren wrote: post #11

lisper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much? (or vice versa, has a fellow lisper found your code hard to understand) I wonder if the flexibility and power of lisp might work against co-operation in this way too. I've witnessed confusion caused by operator-overloading in C++ (I heard that that's common); lisp is more customizable.

> Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much?

Yes. But that is not a problem unique to Lisp. It's possible to write unreadable code in any language. And in general Lisp's introspection capabilities and macroexpand make it easier to reverse-engineer things that in other languages.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#16

Post by Tiomaidh » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:52 PM UTC

I like and agree with the article, but:

    an attempt was made to port part of that code (the
    planner) from Lisp to C++. After a year that effort
    had to be abandoned because the planner team just
    couldn't make it work.

I'm sure they'd struggle just as much if the planner was written in assembly, and not because assembly is a far more elegant language...

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#17

Post by j_baker » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 9:59 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #9

Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim: There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case. Extraordinary deve…

> Linus would probably be more productive in LISP

...

> he outcompetes everyone by superior design, by pragmatism and by being a good team-leader.

On their face, these statements seem contradictory, don't they? How is it pragmatic to turn down a tool that yields better productivity?

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#18

Post by bitwize » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 10:14 PM UTC

6ren wrote: post #11

lisper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much? (or vice versa, has a fellow lisper found your code hard to understand) I wonder if the flexibility and power of lisp might work against co-operation in this way too. I've witnessed confusion caused by operator-overloading in C++ (I heard that that's common); lisp is more customizable.

I find lack of understandability to be a bigger problem for Perl and PHP -- for entirely different reasons.

And yet good clean code is written in these languages, and they are successful for better or worse.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#19

Post by baudehlo » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

It's worth noting that he says (in the other article he links to): "In fact, in a number of cases I saw people whip things up in Perl in a couple of hours that would have taken me days or weeks to do in Lisp.".

So therefore Perl > Lisp > everything? (I'm kidding for the humour impaired)

What he gained from using Lisp was not worrying about memory management, and built-in data structures that made life easy. These days you can get that with a lot of different languages (and I would argue that Java is not one of those languages), languages that also perform as well as Lisp.

So what's my conclusion? That I think there are both - genius programmers who can code well and quickly in just about any language, and also languages that let you build things a lot faster than traditional languages.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#20

Post by SeanDav » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 10:52 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #10

bad_user wrote: post #9

Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim: There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case. Extraordinary deve…

> the author assumes he's one of those geniuses Exactly the opposite actually. Not only do I not assume that, I specifically deny it.

Actually, even though you deny that you are a genius I think you are. I don't think your article refutes the original article by John Cook at all as you are one of the very small percentage of people that can "make things happen" in Lisp or any other language.

I would suggest you are too much of an engineer to use an "inferior" tool like C++ or Java because you know there is something "better" otherwise I am sure you would achieve equally spectacular results in other languages.