How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) • Hacker News Board

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#231

Post by timbit42 » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #227

I learned C and LISP pretty much at the same time (back when rocks were young and you needed a PDP-11 if you wanted to run Unix). Then I went to college and the first course in the Computer Science major was a "killer" they taught in Pascal. Okay, so Pascal is a kind of screwed-up C, and I could deal with that. That "killer" course had a semester-long, multi-phase project that was a kind of symbolic calculator (with…

Technically, both Pascal and C are derivatives of Algol. Pascal is a variation on Algol. C is a screwed-up Algol.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#232

Post by golergka » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

pritambarhate wrote: post #219

segmondy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Skype was a chat tool.

> The market doesn't care about core CS.

Yeah, implementing a peer-to-peer voice over IP with Skype's late 00s quality (which fell significantly since then) is not "core CS" and is just "plumbing", right.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#233

Post by allthesethings » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #206

segmondy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you have a text file that you just need to slice and dice. The tool to use is awk/sed/tr/cut, or perl. Got rules? prolog. Got massive array data? APL. Got multiple massive array data that you wish to combine and separate in various ways? SQL. Surely, you can use python for all those things. But should you? Arguably, yes, most especially when several of them apply to the same process, rather than to separate piec…

Likewise, an argument can be made that developers should reach for Excel more often, because Excel is what the business world knows and uses.

We have so many great, specialized tools. But the act of development often bifurcates into "problems that don't have to scale, or even present a great interface" and "problems that need extensive customization at every layer and support millions of users" and our stacks reflect that.

So tooling choice is often more dependent on maximizing leverage while setting appropriate cutoff points for scalability - in almost all production scenarios you are better off simply to design the system down to the featureset of available off-the-shelf tooling and anticipate a hard break where it migrates upwards, versus thinking you have to boil the oceans immediately so that all facets can be transitioned smoothly and all features are possible right now.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#234

Post by jgh » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

d3ckard wrote: post #40

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…

For the past four years I've architected, built, and maintained a system largely designed using the pipes and filters pattern. Does that make me Mario?

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#235

Post by dhimes » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #163

dhimes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College doesn't go half the way to prepare you to be a successful engineer. This is something I'm hearing alot at the moment, and not just about engineering. What would you say college taught you?

I imagine this varies, but for me most of college was very much about the pure bits of computer science - how things tick, so to speak. But very little of your day to day at most enterprises is about writing new versions of data structures, or academic-level operating systems/database work (obviously there are some roles in the industry where this is the task, but it's not the majority). That's not to say learning it…

Thank you for your thorough reply. Colleges are under fire, even from their own ranks, by people whom I believe confuse training with education, but it's clear that's not your issue.

It sounds to me like there needs to be some sort of deep-dive "onboarding" program where new hires can work on a curriculum of projects and learn the SOPs of the organization.

Colleges could take some of it on, of course (testability and maintainability for example), but one of the complaints I heard even ten years ago is that they can't keep up with the changes in the field. No true fundamental best-practice principles have evolved, it's largely company-dependant.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#236

Post by Waterluvian » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

d3ckard wrote: post #40

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…

"actual software engineering" is like saying that you're not doing "actual farming" unless you're using some oxen and an iron plough.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#237

Post by mattmanser » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

garganzol wrote: post #149

dahauns wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Err, or just use Razor cshtml?

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#238

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

d3ckard wrote: post #40

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 agree 80% with this, I'll add something. I always had a lispy side, I hated Java, PHP, C and others prevalent languages that most companies would bet their money on, I like APL, I like Forth.

That said I found something weird, sometimes, and with a little bit of adequate libraries (guava for instance) I enjoy doing some Java. It's verbose, way more than lisp, clojure, kotlin (not even mentionning mr Haskell of course). But I find a little pleasure in doing code there. It's manual, it requires doing a lot of things but even though its slower and more "work" it's another kind of stimulation, that I think is one large factor of people doing code in subpar languages. They're just happy doing things and solving things their own way.

Some say that lisp and haskell can't be mainstream because their power is best fit for complex problems, and I think that hints to my previous point. People who need more than mainstream have the brain power and desire to solve non mainstream things.

ps: about the plumbing thing, you might have heard that MIT switched to python exactly for that reason. I was and still am stumped that the people would brought SICP decided that plumbing was the way to go.

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#239

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #69

d3ckard wrote: post #40

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.

That's a misinterpretation of parent's comment.

I think he meant fidgeting with pre made solutions hoping they will work, instead of having principled ways to craft things.

If SpaceX were to "plumb" as he meant it, they would use of the shelf modules and ideas for quick results. Instead they actually designed their rockets mostly from scratch (very rare in space, where it's often a rule not to go off what's provent to work).

Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

#240

Post by mikelevins » Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #25

This is from 2006 though. Since then functional programming has picked up a lot of steam again, and I'm pretty sure having been a lisper for 30 years gets you good jobs. If not in Lisp, haskell, F#, clojure or whatever...

It has gotten me the best jobs I've had, but they are few and far between.

If you want to be a Lisp programmer then you pretty much have to be good at other things, too, or you may starve waiting for that next Lisp job to come along.

Of course, you can always just write your own products in Lisp.