221–230 of 433 posts
So me being entrepreneurial-minded, I read this as: He was no good for the common programming languages of the day used by many employers. But if he would have struck out on his own, he would have crushed the competition who were writing page after page of code when his own one page would do just fine. Disclaimer: Not a Lisper
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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 don't agree with this view. Most jobs working with software development is about creating business value. Either as an end-user product that your customers are going to use or with internal tooling that will help the business have more access to data, streamline processes, increase efficiency, etc. This "no true Scotsman" approach to software development is actually quite funny after a while being a professional, i…
BTW, I'm now part of the business side now and a manager. If you give me time constraints, you don't get to give me feature demands, you can give me your prioritized feature list and I can tell you what we can deliver given all other constraints. If you demand all the features, then I take away the time constraint.
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>Lisp is Turing-complete while StringTemplate doesn't. Well...C# String interpolation is.
C# string interpolation is fast and preferable solution that works great at smaller scale (which is probably close to 99.99% of all use cases). Having said that, C# string interpolation is not user-configurable, and you cannot realistically use it to generate, say, 300 lines of highly sophisticated text that is a subject to frequent modifications during product development. One of the popular tasks for a larger scale…
But why would you want Turing completeness in a user facing templating engine? This is generally considered harmful, leading to all kinds of maintenance horrors. (And that's why StringTemplate deliberately isn't.)
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The APL / J / K family of languages seems to be very strong with this effect. If it fits your problem domain, it's (apparently) so powerful that using anything else feels like a frustrating waste of time.
Those of you interested in APL/J/K might find Iverson's book Elementary Algebra interesting where he defines lots of operations in array notation. I dug up this PDF looking for one that was out of print: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/Elem...
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The OP lists several features Lisp had decades before they were common to find in more widely used languages, so some of it is for historical reasons. There are two things lisps, including Scheme and Clojure have that are weak or absent in most popular languages: One is macros. Being able to transform code before it is run using the language's built-in data structures provides a solution when the language just doesn'…
> Why is my editor on my PC not talking to the app running on my Android phone and letting me see its state and make changes in real time? All my opinion, of course: The time (cost) required to create such easily available introspection is too high for the comparatively small gains. REPLs in modern languages (when even implemented) are just so often a completely separate mode of operation.
But a person designing and implementing programming-language tools has to deliberately choose to provide the needed features because implementing them after the fact raises the costs and lowers the benefits. That means such a person must believe that the gains are worth the cost. The only people likely to believe that are people already familiar with those kinds of systems.
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…
That "killer" course had a semester-long, multi-phase project that was a kind of symbolic calculator (with sets and operations on them). It was maybe a couple hundred lines of LISP . . . so I wrote a LISP interpreter in Pascal (with a garbage collector, natch), then wrote the meat of the project in LISP, embedded in the Pascal source. Was the only person in a class of 300 or so who completed the project that semester, but the professors were not amused with the approach I took. Can't imagine why :-)
I've never used a functional language in production, but I've stolen LISP techniques and used them in quite a few products. I never felt frustrated by the fact that I couldn't use LISP or Scheme or whatever in and had to use C/C++/Pascal/Java/C# instead, but have seen it happen in other engineers (notably when the Apple Newton switched from Dylan -- an object-oriented variant of Scheme -- to C++; there were a bunch of forlorn looking ex-Scheme hackers wandering the hallways, clutching copies of the C++ Annotated Reference Manual and trying not to cry).
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…
EDIT: From the years being here, and having played with LISP myself, it's a language that appeals to a certain type of programmer, who claim to find it very productive compared to other languages.
And everyone else hates it.
So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.
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Often times it is inferior, because you are acutely missing things it does not have, but did not yet learned to use things it does have effectively. So, the secret is to be alone in a room, so you can swear freely. Walk around when angry and complain to yourself. But always go back and continue using it and eventually, that phase will pass. After that you will build new set of habits that work around disadvantages an…
This just seems like being around something awful long enough that you develop a form of stockholm syndrome.
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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…
> However the market does't care for that. The market prefers short term gains over long term gains. I agree with this. For example, Sun was sold for $5.6B in 2009. [1] While Skype was sold for $8.5B in 2011 [2]. Sun had Solaris, Java, SPARC, and MySQL. Skype was a chat tool. Even today many popular databases find it hard to get billion-dollar valuations, while multiple Social Companies has done it. The market doesn'…
Solaris, Java, SPARC and MySQL had all demonstrated that they weren't going to acquire major revenue streams, at least under the ownership of Sun. Their valuations reflect two different types of company, something the market is very able to understand.