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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)

#61

Post by SlowBro »

Jtsummers wrote: post #54
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

Except by the end of the post he finds programmers in those “inferior” languages (by measure of verbosity which was a main criteria he used to rule them out for himself) were keeping up with him. And some, like the Perl coders, were faster than him on some tasks.

Thank you, I only skimmed the post.

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

#62

Post by arethuza »

kamaal wrote: post #43
bhaak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was slightly surprised when I Googled AbstractFactoryServeletConfigurationSingletonDispatcher that your comment was the only match (at least at the time I looked).

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

#64

Post by crispyambulance »

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…

AFAIK, the guy has had a marvelous and productive career.

When he says "...knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career" he just means that at some point in time he switched to other things. There was no "destruction". It was "a pivot"-- to use HN lingo.

I think anyone who makes programming (let alone programming in a particular tool/language) the absolute focus of their career is in for a major disappointment. The OP was NOT crushed by his realization. He just moved on and appears to have been very successful regardless. Not a big deal unless one is obsessed with Lisp.

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

#65

Post by baldfat »

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…

People really should learn Racket through this book: "How to Design Programs, Second Edition" http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

Dense and very complete into learning a Lisp. The one HUGE benefit is I see Racket moving into the most modern programming Lisp. Racket really looks like it has a future.

1) Concurrency and Parallelism (Without pull all your hair out) - http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/concurrency.html

2) Great Documentation http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/index.html

3) It will make you a better programmer in other languages

Racket's biggest problem - It's fun to use so everyone has their own solutions for many common problems.

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

#66

Post by bhaak »

peteretep wrote: post #59
bhaak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is categorically untrue for Perl.

Care to elaborate?

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

#67

Post by vidarh »

bhaak wrote: post #52
kamaal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

Ruby syntax is really quite insane. It's just that the insanity is contained in dark corners that most of us thankfully rarely have to deal with. Consider for example that this is the literal string "x": '% x '. So is % + linefeed + x + linefeed, because for most characters the character after a prefix '%' will be the quote character of a quoted string. And that includes whitespace.

There's all kinds of crazy little bits like that littered around Ruby.

It's still my favorite language, but it is also totally infuriating sometimes.

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

#68

Post by weavie »

submeta wrote: post #47

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, eve…

We are getting to the stage now where a lot of languages are catching up with the features that lisp had in the 70's, so the huge benefits of lisp aren't quite as obvious as they used to be.

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

#69

Post by pjc50 »

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.

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