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The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

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Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#121

Post by JonChesterfield »

bmitc wrote: post #34

Does anyone use Shen? I was looking into it recently and thus recognize the author of this post as the originator of Shen. https://shenlanguage.org/ Why would one use Shen over Common Lisp, Racket, Chez Scheme, or Clojure, for example?

Shen does something unusual in deployment. Their idea is to write a smallish number of intrinsics and data structures in your main language, and then import the shen interpreter on that. This gives you code written in shen, callable from the host language.

This is interesting for sharing code across multi-language projects, e.g. as a JavaScript library and a Java one, where the shen interpreter gets written once per language and now all your library code is callable from any of them.

I think it's a minor misfire that this is an interpreter, as opposed to a compiler from shen to whatever language, but that would be fixable. I'd rather compile the shared definitions to raw c++ code ahead of time than run an interpreter.

Aside from that, the definition is mostly in shen (modulo said primitives) so it has an axiomatic angle to it, and the type checker is a prolog. Compiler and prolog engine both available to user code of course.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#122

Post by JonChesterfield »

talldrinkofwhat wrote: post #81
Aerbil313 wrote: post #40

I'm exactly this type of student. 18 yo, just starting university next month. Any advices? Every single thing in the article fits my life so far, the boredom, the pointlessness of all things, the ease of brilliance, 1 to 1, sans the sadness because I'm still hopeful that the world can be fixed and am still an idealist. (I attribute this to my faith.) My classmates always envied how little or none I work for the same…

Diversify, socialize, and start things before they're due*. Take classes / sit in on lectures from different fields (art history, painting, russian literature, architecture/furniture making... the list goes on, just make sure it's interesting to you). If you've got AP credits racked, your entire first year's worth of requirements just got freed. Use them piece-by-piece over your semesters to explore other avenues rat…

> *I never did figure out how deadlines work.

The failure mode goes "this thing will take two days, I'll start two days before the deadline, oops". The fix is "this thing will take two days, I'll start it immediately". You can then still drop it after two days if you wish, but you have options if your estimate was poor.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#123

Post by kragen »

sph wrote: post #106
kragen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is vanishingly unlikely that ken thompson and rob pike are unaware that people sometimes program to explore a problem space

Ken's first language is pretty tolerant of programmer silliness, maybe too much.

do you mean ibm 709 assembly or what

i don't actually know what he was hacking on at berkeley

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#124

Post by adrianN »

rglullis wrote: post #79
adrianN wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being seen as a simple cog has the benefit that the relationship with your employer is clear: you show up and do want they want you to do, they pay you. Nothing more, nothing less. That leaves you to define your identity using something other than salaried work.

Part-time always requires a change in the contract, even as Teilzeit in Elternzeit (at least the part of the contract that says how many hours you need to work has to be changed). All the regulations regarding regular part-time can be found here https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tzbfg/index.html §8 is probably the most relevant for you.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#125

Post by AnthonBerg »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #17
AnthonBerg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super interesting. Thank you. Feels similar to subtle patterns in my next of kin and their inner workings. So I can read more, would you mind sharing the name of the disorder?

The disorder’s called visual snow syndrome, it’s named after the main symptom that differentiates it from other disorders which is TV-static like visual distortion but it sometimes causes a lot of other things typically associated with migraine to the point before it was studied in its own right it was assumed to be an uncommon variation of migraine; unlike migraine though for many people it doesn’t produce any pain…

Ah. Funny. I probably have this. That was unexpected. Thank you.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#126

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » 

  1  he is
  2  his time
  3  he or
  4  his assignments
  5  he doesn
  6  guy is
  7  his low
  8  his guitar
  9  guy and
  10  him go
  11  him then
  12  he chooses
  13  he goes
  14  his natural
  15  he can
  16  he wants
  17  he goes
  18  he relies
  19  his natural
  20  him through
  21  his assignments
  22  He experiences
  23  his usual
  24  He can
  25  his assignment
  26  he hands
  27  he doesn
  28  his official
  29  him too
  30  his UNIX
  31  he would
  32  he could
  33  his own
  34  He flunks
  35  He ends
  36  He can
  37  his strength
  38  him to
  39  He conceives
  40  he embarks
  41  his resources
  42  his own
  43  him so
  44  he will
  45  his sensitivity
  46  he knows
  47  he smells
  48  He can
  49  he is
My conclusion: this is about something that only happens to guys.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#127

Post by cb321 »

potta_coffee wrote: post #70
netbioserror wrote: post #63

I've found, as a Lisper, that the secret to being effective and valuable to a company such that you're both irreplaceable and not too much of a drag on the rest of the organization is to pick secret weapons that have slightly more overlap with the normal world than Lisp. Clojure, Nim, Elixir, and more faintly flirt with the true unbridled power of a CL environment, but primarily provide useful abstractions and some f…

What do you like about Nim? I've started playing with it and it's quite comfy but I don't know much about it's capabilities yet.

Nim is terse yet general and can be made even more so with effort. E.g., You can gin up a little framework that is even more terse than awk yet statically typed and trivially convertible to run much faster like https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/rp.md

You can statically introspect code to then generate related/translated ASTs to create nearly frictionless helper facilities like https://github.com/c-blake/cligen .

You can do all of this without any real run-time speed sacrifices, depending upon the level of effort you put in / your expertise. Since it generates C/C++ or Javascript you get all the abilities of backend compilers almost out of the box, like profile-guided-optimization or for JS JIT compilation.

EDIT: There really is much more, as with any system - I was just trying to give a flavor of what appeals to me.

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#128

Post by memefrog »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #126

1 he is 2 his time 3 he or 4 his assignments 5 he doesn 6 guy is 7 his low 8 his guitar 9 guy and 10 him go 11 him then 12 he chooses 13 he goes 14 his natural 15 he can 16 he wants 17 he goes 18 he relies 19 his natural 20 him through 21 his assignments 22 He experiences 23 his usual 24 He can 25 his assignment 26 he hands 27 he doesn 28 his official 29 him too 30 his UNIX 31 he would 32 he could 33 his own 34 He fl…

[flagged]

Re: The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

#130

Post by wtetzner »

sph wrote: post #2

I quite enjoyed this article, but I reckon they're talking about ADHD rather than "bipolar" mind. Seen under that lens, I resonate with his caricature. Focus is a precious, rare resource outside my control. Mainstream languages, made for collaboration in big teams rather than maximum personal freedom, soon impose restrictions that kill hyperfocus. The "unused variable is an error" is the most egregious of them that I…

> Rust, C++, Go, Python, etc. are good, but they're not made for us.

I also don't see any technical reason you couldn't have the best of both worlds. E.g. a dynamic runtime environment that allows recompiling functions on the fly etc., but also have a separate batch compiler that can type check the program as a whole, do whole program optimizations, etc.

So you can do exploratory programming while developing, and the run the batch compiler before committing changes, when doing releases, etc.

I think the biggest challenge is simply the amount of effort required to design and implement it (and of course someone who's interested enough in it to do it).

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