I would have hired Doug, but... • Hacker News Board

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#241

Post by no-name-1231 » Sat, May 09, 2015, 8:17 PM UTC

codemac wrote: post #232

lisper wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more BASIC, but I still code in Common Lisp whenever I can. And I'm using some library code that I wrote when I was in grad school 25 years ago. Once you grok Lisp, everything else is easy. You come to realize that the vast majority of what passes for "new technologies" is really just a re-discovery of something that exists (or is easily implemented) in CL. That makes it a lot easier (if a tad frustrating at times…

GOOPS[0] in guile is definitely hugely inspired by CLOS, which also has generic functions with multi-method dispatch. I highly recommend guile to anyone who wants the battery included nature of common lisp. I know that racket is also a great choice here, I just have little experience with it.

Racket's object system is largely inspired by Java. So is its statically-compiled module system (in which you can't change anything once it's been compiled, unlike a real Lisp), and Raco build tool. Programming with objects in Racket feels a lot like programming with Java objects in Clojure.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#242

Post by emodendroket » Mon, May 11, 2015, 1:41 PM UTC

billmalarky wrote: post #238

emodendroket wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most frustrating thing about it is how hard it is to find knowledgeable people. I went in to the doctor for RSI symptoms that were nothing like carpal tunnel and she insisted I had to have carpal tunnel and started talking about getting surgery to release it within like 5 minutes of us meeting. Perhaps the most galling part of this was where she went "here, let me show you" and had me do the various exercises of…

Wow, your experience mirrors mine exactly . Turned out to be a torn ligament. People wonder why I don't trust doctors, it's not that I don't trust all of them, just most I've dealt with are suspect. There really needs to be a better physician review resource online.

I read some of the literature about RSI and this is a pretty common experience, which certainly does shake your faith in the medical establishment a bit. RSI is not even very rare.

I guess now people think I'm a crank; I posted here that I thought doctors just don't spend enough time with their patients and it's worrying and I was downvoted and mocked pretty hard.

Unfortunately I'm not confident that online resources would allow better decisions. I'm not convinced that patients would, by and large, do a much better job evaluating the quality of their doctors' care. The doctor who just gave patients antibiotics whenever they asked for them, whether or not it was appropriate, would probably be more popular in such a service than the doctor who took the time to understand their condition and explain that that wasn't an appopriate treatment.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#243

Post by hoprocker » Tue, May 12, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

spacemanmatt wrote: post #204

hoprocker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was it that said, "It's not 10 years worth of experience, it's the same year repeated 10 times"?

Someone with 10 years of experience, unable to recognize the nuances one picks up by repeating those 10 years of experience with 10 years of context to make better sense of it.

Excellent point; that 10 years can make you a specialist.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#244

Post by innocentoldguy » Thu, May 14, 2015, 7:15 PM UTC

lukego wrote: post #211

innocentoldguy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm approaching 50 and I think programming is more exciting now than it has ever been. There are so many interesting technologies out there that I want to learn, master, and use (e.g. Elixir, Erlang, Clojure, Swift, Lua, Haskell, and myriad frameworks). I also like the way open source options have completely eliminated the necessity for me to work with commercial languages and technologies, which I always found a bit…

Tangent: I find it interesting that Erlang is an emerging technology that you are interested in learning at age 50, and yet it has been used in production with a steadily growing community since you were in your 20s. It has simply taken a few decades to grow enough to be a common item on programmers' radars. I find it fascinating that the gradual adoption of new technology maps onto human time spans like this. This m…

I didn't say it was an "emerging" technology. I said it was an "interesting" technology.