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The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

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Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#71

Post by floren »

unixr wrote: post #37
troupe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programming from inside the system. Can you elaborate on that? I think you are saying that REPLs in other languages don't do what you can do in Lisp, but I don't think I know enough to fully understand why.

Imagine this: You start a fresh REPL session with a vague idea of something you want to build. You have good tooling that enables you to write code in your favourite editor and pipe it to the REPL through a socket. You write a couple of functions and send them to the REPL. You call them a few times with some test arguments, maybe define a couple global variables while testing, and realize one of the functions doesn't…

What happens when you want to share the thing you built with somebody else? If I type a defun into a REPL, is there a good way to get source code back out again?

Because there's a problem I've run into several times when writing Lisp (I use SLIME): I decide to refactor some stuff, so I rewrite some stuff, maybe remove a function or two from the source as part of that. Things seem to be working fine. I save my .lisp files and then at some point end up restarting the Lisp process (often because McCLIM can be kind of flaky and lose its connection to the X server). When I go to load my code back in, I get errors, because oops I was actually still calling that deleted function somewhere -- it "worked" before because the old function was still hanging out in the image.

When I develop in a compiled language, I just accept that I'm going to be re-building the entire thing from scratch (equivalent to restarting the lisp process & re-loading the source files) every time I want to try a change; if I broke something, I'll find out the next time I run make/go build/whatever. When I'm developing in Lisp, and I'll freely accept that my Lisp dev flow probably isn't ideal, it's so easy to screw up but be unaware of it for hours if not days: I write some code, I'm happy, I close Emacs, then a week later I come back and try to load my package and it's just broken.

I could solve it for myself by just using images: the "deleted" function would persist in the image, and every time I started working again it would be there. But if I ever want to let somebody look at the code, hack on it, make changes, what's that look like?

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#72

Post by adrianN »

rglullis wrote: post #45
adrianN wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered part-time?

I did and still do, but it's hard to find someone willing to hire part-time for a lead/staff/IC position. If you have any good tips, I'd appreciate it very much.

Move to a country where working part time is a right ( eg Germany), get hired full time, wait a year or so, reduce your hours.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#73

Post by drones »

While there are definitely some tortured genius types out there, I think many of those who present as such described in the article really aren't. You know, it's pretty easy to appear like a genius when none of your peers have anything to show for it either. The only question I ask for genius is "What has this guy done?". Which is a pretty difficult question to answer when you're still at school and haven't lived a life yet.

Our own self concept is based on the story we tell ourselves. This is an important emotional/intellectual regulatory tool we deal with in a daily basis. Evolution gave us self reflection because it's very useful to us. But it doesn't mean it's a reflection of reality.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#74

Post by corinroyal »

galfarragem wrote: post #25
stefcoetzee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which battle is that?

The battle for relevance. A language that isn't growing is dying.

"Lost the battle?" Ruby is a far better ecosystem now than it was when it was getting popular. C is "dying" according to your definition. It's number 2 on the TIOBE index, while Ruby is in the top twenty. I'm using Common Lisp do build my product, and that one is long dead and buried according to popularity.

Maybe there are business reasons to avoid less popular programming languages, but there aren't any programming reasons to avoid them. Maybe we should stop treating tools as if they were candidates for homecoming king and queen.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#75

Post by sitzkrieg »

sph wrote: post #61
jakeinspace wrote: post #36

I’m fairly annoyed with myself on my worse days for heading into embedded as a career path when Lisp (clojure mainly) is the only development process I’ve really ever felt fit my brain. I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision. I like C and assembly because they’re…

I just got a Pico W to run Forth on. It's like a REPL for low level hardware, and I'm unreasonably excited to play with it this weekend. Somehow I've gone 36 years without anyone telling me I could do explorative programming on bare metal, and now I can't shut up about it.

yea forth is amazing for that, i used to develop a lot of baseline or "test everything in the beard spin" type if firmwares in forth and miss it

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#76

Post by slushh »

>The flip side of all that energy and intelligence - the sadness, melancholia and loss of self during a down phase.

On that other side, the positive side, is there a self?

>Another feature about this guy is his low threshold of boredom. He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its properly finished.

Working frantically at a task doesn't sound like self-realization.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#77

Post by ablyveiled »

drones wrote: post #73

While there are definitely some tortured genius types out there, I think many of those who present as such described in the article really aren't. You know, it's pretty easy to appear like a genius when none of your peers have anything to show for it either. The only question I ask for genius is "What has this guy done?". Which is a pretty difficult question to answer when you're still at school and haven't lived a l…

Geniuses are Generative

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#78

Post by bmitc »

bsima wrote: post #68
bmitc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the link to the talk! I'll watch it for sure. If I am interesting in using functional languages (currently F#, Elixir, and Racket) to explore GUI systems, graphics, symbolic math, numerical computing like machine learning and swarm algorithms and automatic differentiation, agent-based modeling, fractals and general chaos theory stuff, etc., is Shen a good match for that type of exploratory, almost from…

Definitely usable for those cases. You might have to do some extra work to build the necessary libraries though. It’s closer to scheme I think, being a lisp-1, even though it’s originally implemented in Common Lisp.

Thanks! And I watched some bits of that talk and got excited about the whole KLambda thing and the ability to use Shen hosted on top of another platform. That seems very interesting to me, especially since Shen has Prolog inside it, and is something I'm going to look into more.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#79

Post by rglullis »

adrianN wrote: post #72
rglullis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did and still do, but it's hard to find someone willing to hire part-time for a lead/staff/IC position. If you have any good tips, I'd appreciate it very much.

Move to a country where working part time is a right ( eg Germany), get hired full time, wait a year or so, reduce your hours.

I live in Germany already. AFAIK, changing to part-time without any special condition (e.g. Elternzeit) would require a change in the contract, no?

Also, I've had little success breaking into any higher-level position as an employee here. For the past 5 years or so I've worked only remotely for foreign companies and/or freelance and/or on my own projects. Employment offers were low-balling me and in a German company who would see me as a simple cog.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#80

Post by convolvatron »

bsima wrote: post #52
lampshades wrote: post #46

I've never had a professor understand me like this. I picked up Lisp during my Freshman year when I bought SICP. If you look at my transcripts you can easily infer my mental state at the time. Some semesters all A's, others all F's (or W's), with no rhyme or reason. I graduated with a 1.7 GPA, showed up high to class (if I showed up at all), and barely made it through. It took me 9 years to graduate between all the s…

> I picked up Lisp during my Freshman year ... I do hate the corporate world (and have trouble staying anywhere long) with a passion and would very much like to find a way out. maybe we should work together

I'm going to over-generalize and say that we are a type. while we don't really work that well with people who have different mindsets sometimes, we don't necessarily work very well together either :(
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