Earlier quoted context omitted.
COBOL?
COBOL and luxury present in one English sentence is a syntax error.
Per your own sentence, you've just committed a syntax error.
How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
31–40 of 433 posts
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#32Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#33> knowing Lisp made me all too keenly aware of Java's shortcomings, and I had a very hard time not being angry at how stupid it was that I was being forced to use it. I would take this as a the thing to remember from this. When you are too angry at something, you cant learn it. I have seen the emotional refusal to learn new inferior thing (or read comments that amounted to the same) many times already. It is somethin…
I'm interested in knowing your secret to finding inferior new things interesting.
Step one: stop considering them inferior, since something inferior cannot be interesting by definition.
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#34Using any language for twenty years straight is going to make you complacent - but goodness, how many languages would have given you that luxury?
> what other programming language would have given you that luxury? I'm not sure what you mean. C? C++? Java? Perl? Perhaps Python?
I think of those C and Perl fit the most.
You can't write C++ or Java like you did 20 years ago (of course, you could but you shouldn't). Both languages and their whole ecosystems have evolved tremendously in 2 decades.
The C and Perl style OTOH has changed less. A programmer of those language from 20 years ago that is transported to the present day will have much less problems fitting in than a programmer of C++ and Java would.
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#35Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#36Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#37So 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
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
COBOL and luxury present in one English sentence is a syntax error.
If you never knew anything but COBOL you'd probably love programming it. Knowledge of better techniques can be seriously damaging to your career. I suffered some damage from not wanting to touch Windows (3.1) after discovering Linux in the early 1990s. Today, most jobs advertisements still look toxic.
I can relate. At my workplace, I think I'm the only person on the whole site who uses Linux as their main OS in place of Windows. It has its obvious downsides, since company tools are designed to work on Windows and everything else is a bigger or smaller hack, but given my general comfort of working on top of Linux, I think I'm still better off feeling the pain of using a less supported but more comfortable OS.
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl?
Perl is one of those languages, if you get used to the power of Perl it could be really hard to move to other C based languages. I can only imagine how it would be for anyone using Lisp. The power there is so much, going to something like Java from there would feel down right suffocating. Going from Perl to Python in my case largely felt like trying to a run a marathon in chains.
Your comment made me think of the quote by Guy Steele: "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
Even the designers of Java didn't expect programmers to go from Lisp to Java.
Re: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
#40For 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 explains language preferences. We don't choose the best tools, we choose the best tooling. And best tooling is the one which we can comfortably fit in our minds, so advanced concepts are mostly ignored and the hype wheel constantly turns. To put it shortly - smart people write better and better tools, so the rest can handle bigger and bigger projects writing mediocre code.
Of course, as every programmer, I live in constant fear that I am part of the plumbing crowd waiting to be exposed.