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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#121

Post by throw__away7391 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

That is literally where I thought he was going with this initially, that programmers are stuck in the single dimension of their own favorite language.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#122

Post by DeadEarnest »

chihuahua wrote: post #39
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #23

A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness. This is a profound misapp…

It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions. Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp. Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the s…

Two extremely powerful things that would be awful not in Lisp:

1) Electric Clojure 2) Rama

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#123

Post by syklemil »

GMoromisato wrote: post #49
wrs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m writing a lot of Rust lately, which is rapidly becoming regarded as a conventional language, and I sure do appreciate all those things I use every day that end in exclamation points.

I'm curious here, because I don't know Rust. What's the difference between a macro and a function call from the caller's perspective? Do I (as the caller) need to know I'm calling a macro? Why? Why is println! a macro when it's a function in almost all other languages?

I think another macro, `json!()` works better as an example for that: inside the `json!()` you write something very similar to actual JSON. So when you see a `!` you know that there might be something out-of-the-ordinary following: https://docs.rs/serde_json/latest/serde_json/macro.json.html

Incidentally it also means that formatters like `rustfmt` won't apply the usual rules. For the macros that don't really deviate from ordinary Rust syntax, that can be a bit annoying.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#125

Post by zbentley »

Chinjut wrote: post #83
libraryofbabel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

Why are we limiting ourselves to business concepts?

Not GP, but … because the overwhelming majority of programming is done in support of businesses selling things?

I’m not just talking about people who program for a living. The majority of academic CS chooses its research directions because of what limits people are running into for business; even privacy-focused software has been commoditized by many business; a large amount of OSS development is by (and often paid for by the employers of) people working for money; heck, after Linus’s initial “just a hobby OS” period even Linux’s contribution base was primarily driven by business needs (even if those needs influenced it via “contributor had a problem at work and committed a solution for it upstream in spare time” as often as “paid contributor upstreamed a change on behalf of their employer”).

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#126

Post by worthless-trash »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #29
ModernMech wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations ... Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. I think the field of programming languages has grown enough that we have to start acknowledging the future of programming largely won't be in t…

As a member of the handmade community, I certainly hope that corporate constraints aren't the main future of the field. I just think it's a major part of the answer as it stands today.

It is. Gp is just ahead of the curve. Business is so scared of variety we encourage the lowest common denominator, no matter how bad it is.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#127

Post by tmtvl »

nine_k wrote: post #19
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript. Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mu…

The reason I switched from Scheme to Common Lisp was because I wanted type checking more than I wanted hygienic macros or case-sensitive (by default) symbols.

Being able to do something like:

  (deftype Digit ()
    '(Integer 0 9)

  (deftype Digit-Vector (&optional (length '*))
    `(Vector Digit ,length))

  (defun integer->digit-vector (integer)
    (declare (type Integer integer))
    (coerce (loop :for character :across (format nil "~D" integer)
                  :for digit := (char-digit-p character)
                  :when digit
                    :collect digit)
            'Digit-Vector))
And then have SBCL warn me if I try to use the resulting Digit-Vector in a function which wants a String (for example) is useful.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#128

Post by zozbot234 »

didibus wrote: post #107
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

I think the missing piece is that "more expressive" languages do not automatically create more value at the team or company level. Languages like Lisp, Clojure, Rust, Haskell, Erlang give strong engineers room to build powerful abstractions, but they also increase cognitive load and ramp up cost. In most orgs with churn and constant hiring, you do not get to enjoy "we built great abstractions and now we are fast". Yo…

> Languages like Lisp, Clojure, Rust, Haskell, Erlang give strong engineers room to build powerful abstractions ... You live in "someone new is trying to understand what the last person did".

In a language like C++, Rust or even Haskell, those "powerful abstractions" are mostly about building libraries, not application code. You still benefit from powerful libraries that were built as part of the ecosystem, even while keeping your own application code simple and intuitive to ease onboarding of new coders. Part of the "powerful abstractions" is to enable a "hand-holding and guard rails" approach for application code that's going to interface with that full-featured library.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#129

Post by syklemil »

johnfn wrote: post #56
wrs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essay’s thesis is “most people don’t consider Lisp because they don’t know what’s different and special about it”. I think that’s unarguably the case. You equated that with “everyone else is stupid”, which is uncharitable and not at all what the essay says. Why would you even bother to write an essay if your audience is too stupid to understand what you’re saying?

Is it really that uncharitable? Yes, it's slightly hyperbolic, but I argue only slightly. Whether intended or not, the tone of the article is patronizing. Here are some examples. > The programmers who live in Flatland > Likewise, you cannot comprehend a new programming dimension because you don’t know how to think in that dimension > the sphere is unable to get the square to comprehend what “up” and “down” mean. All…

> they need to understand that there's another dimension to criticisms of Lisp that aren't just "I don't like parentheses" and that there is substantive feedback to be gleaned.

I'm also somewhat reminded of the decline of Perl and how some people who love and still frequently use Perl don't really seem to even acknowledge the complaints people have about it, which seems to prove the claim about the decline being cultural. According to that kind of attitude, the lack of popularity is inexplicable, and we might actually be lucky that they're not resorting to conspiracy theories to "explain" the mismatch between their preferences and observable reality.

The Haskell motto of "avoid success at all costs" seems a lot healthier, as in, they know they might need to choose between going mainstream and getting to keep a language that suits them personally.

Lots of the Lisp advocacy also comes off as either entirely too vague, like this blog post, or stuck in the age of the `worse-is-better` talk (1989, so predates WWW and nearly all the programming languages in widespread general use). I don't care about comparisons to C, because the only places C is seriously considered for new projects these days are in places where a GC is unacceptable (and purposes Rust isn't certified for or whatever).

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#130

Post by embedding-shape »

joeevans1000 wrote: post #96
embedding-shape wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd call a programmer "brilliant" if they cannot A) make a codebase simple enough for people to contribute to and B) handle the social parts of training someone to get good enough to contribute to the codebase.

Agreed. And this is the real miss of much of the Clojure community. There is a handful of amazing people in there pulling 90% of the weight of bringing noobs in to the language. And the rest don't even seem to notice their efforts. Little awards and grants here and there, yes. But the majority don't even care if the language has wider adoption or not. It works for them and that's enough. But many of the successful pr…

> And this is the real miss of much of the Clojure community

I wasn't pointing to the Clojure community at large, the Clojure community is very welcoming to beginners and newbies, like I was once.

It's true that the focus on the language is improving it for everyone, not just beginners, and that can appear like a bad idea if you're a beginner, but I personally agree with this goal.

The problem mentioned by parent is something I haven't personally experienced, but seems exclusive to their job/position/experience, and I don't understand calling that specific person/developer brilliant.

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