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How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

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

#41

Post by FroshKiller »

incompatible wrote: post #26
watwut wrote: post #16

> 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.

I didn't post that, but I can tell you mine. It's reflecting to myself, "Maybe I'm the asshole."

The new thing sucks. Or am I having a knee-jerk reaction to something unfamiliar? Maybe I'm the asshole.

The new thing falls short of the old thing. Or does it have different goals from the old thing? Maybe I'm the asshole.

Whoever made the decision to put the new thing in my path are out of touch and don't understand what I do or how the old thing helped. Or have they seen something that I don't see yet? Maybe I'm the asshole.

Sometimes I'm the asshole. Never entertaining the possibility that one is the asshole is what makes one the asshole.

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

#42

Post by zaarn »

phoe-krk wrote: post #27
zaarn wrote: post #3

I think the problem there was complacency, as the author mention in their mail. On the other hand, I totally do recommend that everyone picks up some tutorial or guide or book on LISP and learns what the fuzz is all about. Even today, I feel like a lot of people could learn a lot from LISP and S-Expressions, both of which are powerful constructs. (Note: I'm not saying you should use LISP productively, it's something…

> (Note: I'm not saying you should use LISP productively, it's something you should learn for the heck of it, not to actually use it) Well, I do, and I have to say that it can be done. It isn't a road often travelled and it results in people making remarks about your language choices, but as long as my software works, its development is fun for me and my co-coders do not complain, I don't think anything is wrong with…

You can do that too.

I think I may have expressed poorly; whether or not you want to use LISP in production, learn it anyway, because it's LISP.

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

#43

Post by kamaal »

bhaak wrote: post #34
tome wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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++ an…

C++ and Java ecosystems were run over by people who read The GoF book and decided to generate every single permutation and combination of those patterns. Code largely comes out like AbstractFactoryServeletConfigurationSingletonDispatcher.

Also a lot of applications were written as huge monoliths even a few years back.

These days people write applications to do one task properly.

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

#46

Post by vidarh »

watwut wrote: post #16

> 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…

Sometimes it's not worth the pain. I have programmed in Java. I won't do so again. I concede that part of it is stubbornness, but I have to prioritize what I want to spend my time on, and there are enough jobs giving me the opportunity to work on things I like working with that I can afford to dismiss Java out of hand and focus my efforts elsewhere.

I realize not everyone will have that option, but I strongly believe being strongly opinionated about what I will work with has helped me in the long run by ensuring I've actually worked on things where I could feel motivated to deliver, and letting me focus my time on getting better at the technologies I do enjoy working with.

Of course that requires ensuring you build skills in areas where you can find jobs, and that you avoid jobs where you don't get to pick the technologies you're prepared to work with.

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

#47

Post by submeta »

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, even Perl).

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

#48

Post by stevedonovan »

SlowBro wrote: post #37

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

Cf. Paul Graham's 'secret weapon' essay.

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

#49

Post by kbwt »

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…

Reminds me of this picture entitled Life of a game programmer: https://i.imgur.com/sBih7ol.jpg

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

#50

Post by tluyben2 »

pavlov wrote: post #22
zero_shift wrote: post #4

Using any language for twenty years straight is going to make you complacent - but goodness, how many languages would have given you that luxury?

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.

Yep, every time I have to program C# it is an annoyance; so much scrolling, so much text...
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