51–60 of 433 posts
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...
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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.
I find that not surprising. Python is geared a specific type of programmers. If Perl fits your programming, you will feel constrained by Python.
Me personally, I never liked Perl that much. IMO it's not a programming language but a write-only brain dump.
But Ruby is to me what Perl is to others. It's combining the power and expressiveness of Perl with a consistent OO model like Smalltalk and with a sane syntax.
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Mine too. Until Erlang, and now Ada. I'm building myself a harem.
I started with Pascal, then learned Perl. When I was writing Pascal I was excited about stuff I could make the computer do, but pascal made me like the actual act of programming.
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
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…
The sales pitch is clear: don't become a better programmer, get a better toolkit.
I have been quite fortunate to have come into computers before this cloud of marketing madness overtook us. I got to watch the layers roll out one-by-one.
Honestly I have no idea how I would learn programming if I had to do it again today. It's just too much of a byzantine mess. Hell if I would start with the top layers, though. I'd rather know how to write simple code in BASIC than have a grasp of setting up a CRUD website using WhizBang 4.7 When you learn programming, well you should be learning how to program. Not how to breeze through stuff. Breezing through stuff is great when you already know what's going on -- but by the time you already know what's going on, it's unlikely you'll need the layer or framework. (Sadly, the most likely scenario is that you've invented yet another framework and are busy evangelizing it to others.)
This guy's story strikes me as poignant and indicative of where the industry is. They don't care if you can solve people's problems. They care if you're one of the cool kids. It's nerd signaling.
A required thought-piece for all JavaScript devs. Enjoy monopoly while it lasts, but be humble.
Fortunately JavaScript doesn't have the problem described by the OP: "With a secret weapon like Lisp in my arsenal in 1986 I could blow my competition out of the water with one hand tied behind my back and holding a martini in the other." A present-day JavaScript practitioner will have his left hand busy trying to figure out what's this week's fashionable way to pass around some data in this month's fashionable frame…
Very true. Working with Javascript these days feels like jumping from one hoop to another with rarely getting any work done.
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> 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…
My 'design patterns' in C now has a lot more of the things I 'liked' about these languages, lots of abstractions, actors, compartmentalization and many many more, as well as the most important bits like multi-core/threads aware APIs and so on...
I think that if you stick not just to a language but to your set design patterns and even toolset, you fall into what I call 'mind sclerosis' -- HOWEVER -- it's not because your patterns evolve and you update your toolset that you need to change language and go with all the trends... Most 'modern' patterns can be done in any languages.
In fact I do a lot more C these days than I did for the last 20 years...
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.
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> 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…
This is categorically untrue for Perl.
This is very true, especially now. With all the available tools, and libraries, and infrastructure tools, and ..., and ..., and ... the choice of a programming language hardly matters anymore [see caveats below]. What matters is how comfortable you are working with a particular language and set of technologies you chose, and if your choices do not impede you.
[caveats]
Of course, you you want to crunch numbers, or work in a memory/CPU-constrained system, or develop avionics software, then your choice of programming language matters. But let's be honest: the vast majority of us don't do any of those things, and you can whip up a geographically-distributed, auto-scaling cat meme delivery system in any language in a matter of hours.