201–210 of 433 posts
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More importantly it isn’t statically typed (like F#, Haskell, etc)
Common Lisp has strong dynamic typing. Dynamic, because language runtime maintains type information; strong, because each object has its type and cannot be treated as an instance of another type.
For a while now I've had a feeling that all the comments about lack of engineers(especially in software) are vastly underestimated. Probably around 10% of us is capable of doing actual software development. The rest writes plumbing and can handle the project for only as long as abstractions available through libraries can hold the complexity. If we assume most of us don't really know what we're doing, that totally ex…
I sort of agree, but I also disagree. I think 90% of us are capable of doing "actual software development." However the market does't care for that. The market prefers short term gains over long term gains. Perhaps we can blame wallstreet? Due to the demand for short term gains, the ask from most developers is "how fast can you build this" not "how can you build this to be most efficient and cheapest in the long run…
I couldn't answer this question accurately. I can't even give remotely accurate time estimates for projects larger than "build a CLI tool to do this one thing," much less give an informed estimate about the tool's TCO. I feel like I'm just floating down the river, incrementally improving upon the stuff that we've already built and that nothing we planned to accomplish ever is.
I'm sure lots of people here have executed their Grand Vision for a project. But I'm also certain many of us never have.
For a while now I've had a feeling that all the comments about lack of engineers(especially in software) are vastly underestimated. Probably around 10% of us is capable of doing actual software development. The rest writes plumbing and can handle the project for only as long as abstractions available through libraries can hold the complexity. If we assume most of us don't really know what we're doing, that totally ex…
You seem to be experienced and ignorant at the same time
Hunter-gatherers on capitalist democracy, Capitalist democracy on hunter-gatherers, China on India, India on China, US on India, India on Iran, Iran on Israel...
You get the picture.
Perhaps what it really means is "communications failure: exception thrown in cultural assumptions".
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I'd put it differently. Software development severely lacks any objective metrics of performance and quality. We just haven't invented any(at least any practical enough to become mainstream). As a result, we quite often misjudge our(and others') skill and make bad decisions. It's the goal of software to provide more and more features. The problem is, we usually achieve those features by abusing abstractions we are us…
Objective metrics of performance are easy to come with: speed, memory usage, latency, throughput, energy efficiency, depending on type of your software. I can launch Windows Task Manager and those metrics are right there. Those metrics can be measured and compared. Quality isn't hard either, just count bugs. Many customers don't want to pay for performance or quality, they want features, delivery speed, shiny UI and…
What they don't allow though is assessing code quality in terms of single project(i.e. judging if it's good or not). Since in many cases we do not have a good baseline, we are unable to consistently evaluate work. That leaves us with aforementioned problems.
Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN. I played around with Scheme some long time ago, read SICP, learned a lot. And I know Lisp inspired many programmers like the founder of Ruby. But I would not think of Lisp when it comes to solving day to day problems. I rather pick Python because it helps me solve all kinds of problems. There are many more solutions I can think of (Ruby, Node, Go, eve…
Perhaps it has features that Python, Go, Node, and even Perl do not have. The reader is built in the same language as the rest of the compiler which means you can change it: you don't have to fork and compile a new version of a Lisp compiler to parse a completely different syntax or interpret a new kind of grammar. It has amazing error handling in its conditions and restarts system. It has the best OOP system I've ev…
Also Perl 6 is written in itself.
Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN. I played around with Scheme some long time ago, read SICP, learned a lot. And I know Lisp inspired many programmers like the founder of Ruby. But I would not think of Lisp when it comes to solving day to day problems. I rather pick Python because it helps me solve all kinds of problems. There are many more solutions I can think of (Ruby, Node, Go, eve…
If you find yourself in such a scenario, then you haven't reached the enlightenment level. Reaching for a "safe and familiar" procedural/imperative language is like most people reaching for a claw hammer when they wish to hammer and nail something in. To most people, it's the same, they are just hitting something. To a pro, they know when they reach for their claw hammer, a sledge hammer, a mallet, a ball pein, club…
Arguably, yes, most especially when several of them apply to the same process, rather than to separate pieces of data.
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Nerds screw up everything we touch. I don't think we mean to. Whatever the system, we make it more complicated, er featureful. Then we add an abstraction layer. Then we make that layer more complicated. Repeat and rinse. Some abstraction layers help more than they hurt, but the ratio is about 1-in-10 or so. For any given project, there are probably a dozen cool-sounding frameworks or layers, one of which is absolutel…
It's rather disappointing how the industry hasn't made any progress on CRUD application development productivity in the past 20+ years. Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 allowed low-skilled developers to build working client/server CRUD applications far faster than any modern web development framework. Of course it's easier to distribute web applications than thick client Windows applications, but other than that we haven't…
For a while now I've had a feeling that all the comments about lack of engineers(especially in software) are vastly underestimated. Probably around 10% of us is capable of doing actual software development. The rest writes plumbing and can handle the project for only as long as abstractions available through libraries can hold the complexity. If we assume most of us don't really know what we're doing, that totally ex…
Maintaining a distinction between "actual software development" and "plumbing" is elitist, even if you're placing yourself on the downside of that comparison and setting yourself up for imposter syndrome. You can get an awful lot done by "plumbing". Entire businesses like SAP are built on it. It can also be mission critical; in SpaceX, is the literal plumbing of hydraulic fluid and fuel flow unimportant? No.
Maintaining distinctions like this is necessary to have the right people do the right jobs. Some developers like being puzzled by hard problems and will get bored writing adapters for Java classes or connecting A to B in some set of Javascript frameworks. Others are motivated by seeing their high level design realized and don't like having to give too much thought about the lower abstraction layers. Giving these people the wrong jobs is a waste of time and money.
> I saw people whip things up in Perl in a couple of hours that would have taken me days or weeks to do in Lisp. Perl, my first and only love.
Mine too. Until Erlang, and now Ada. I'm building myself a harem.
https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications-...
Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN. I played around with Scheme some long time ago, read SICP, learned a lot. And I know Lisp inspired many programmers like the founder of Ruby. But I would not think of Lisp when it comes to solving day to day problems. I rather pick Python because it helps me solve all kinds of problems. There are many more solutions I can think of (Ruby, Node, Go, eve…
> Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN. Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris, two of the founders of YCombinator, love Lisp/Scheme. They got rich by selling their company Viaweb to Yahoo. You guessed it: Viaweb was written in LISP and Paul Graham believes that this was their secret weapon: > http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html Also the software that drives Hacker News is written in Arc, a…