When did Yegge die?
He got married; much later, he stopped blogging.
Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave
#12This post is not about Yegge. It's a little comparison of Common Lisp and Scheme (Plt Racket). I think a post with such a bad title should not be read no matter its content but YMMV. This is all it contains about Steve Yegge: The quote from Yegge goes something like "Most newcomers independently come to the same conclusion; Scheme is the better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work." Botto…
A while ago I noticed that I was suddenly doing more coding in SBCL than PLT Scheme. When I thought about it, I realized that Steve Yegge said the same thing a long time ago and I remember reacting with dismissal. The post wasn't about Yegge, it was about the idea (which I've heard elsewhere too, he just happened to be the one I remembered at the time) that Scheme is the "better language" while being paradoxically less "useful" than Common Lisp.
In defense of the lame title, I tend to write in order to get things out of my head. Had I known that someone would post that article on Reddit and Hacker News, leading to Jay McCarthy dropping by and asking what, specifically, was wrong with his server, I might have proofread it more than 0 times before posting it anywhere.
Re: Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave
#13I almost can't believe the #3, restarting a webserver for minor changes? That reeks of static, batch-language oriented solution. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with static batch-languages, but I wouldn't have thought Scheme is one.
The other points about the web server (which Jay ended up focusing on more) are really side issues; my biggest gripe was that lack of iteration during the development phase. If I could change code on the fly, I'd be a happy camper.
Re: Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave
#14It also always returns its result, and doesn't have the option of printing to standard-out (you have to use printf for that) (format t "hello world") From PCL: "T is shorthand for the stream STANDARD-OUTPUT , while NIL causes FORMAT to generate its output to a string, which it then returns."
He was complaining that the format in Scheme (and in PLT Racket) doesn't have that CL feature.
That's exactly what I meant. The CL version has options, the Scheme version just takes a format string (which has fewer possible directives than its CL counterpart), which makes it less flexible and slightly more verbose.
To be fair, it's not exactly a straightforward paragraph, and I was talking about two different functions both named "format", so I can see how it might have been confusing.