11–20 of 93 posts
> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?
Same reason most of us use QWERTY keyboards instead of one the many better layouts available. After a long enough time as the dominant tool, things get locked in regardless of whether or not they're the best tool for the job. C-Style languages gained dominance early on and became the defacto standard.
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?
The answer is always that popularity doesn't correlate with merit.
Exactly. If we used popularity and usage rates as the measure of merit, we'd have to conclude that the highest quality restaurant in the world is MacDonald's.
I just wish more people understood that something being Turing Complete isn't a feature, it's a flaw.
> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…
That's because most programmers are incapable of making any informed decision about the language they use (and, even more so, about languages they don't use). There's a strong tribal mentality, a lot of cargo-cults, and the very narrow perspective on what's possible and (more importantly) what's desirable is prevalent.
[1] https://www.erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.h...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is always that popularity doesn't correlate with merit.
> The answer is always that popularity doesn't correlate with merit. Exactly. If we used popularity and usage rates as the measure of merit, we'd have to conclude that the highest quality restaurant in the world is MacDonald's.
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?
StandardML is just as fast, is more simple to learn with more simple syntax and basically zero gotchas, has more powerful syntax, has an actually sound type system (which has better generics than the ones proposed in go), does a better job at defining public functionality (via modules), has a better CST model, and many other great features.
The only area where it loses is standard libraries and marketing. Google invested millions into these two things, so people use their decidedly inferior language.
You'll find that pretty much every big language has a big company behind it that threw tons of money at its development.
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?
With Clojure out there now I think the number of products using a Lisp is underestimated.
If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?