61–70 of 71 posts
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Sometimes I make fun of Paul Graham.
Um, your site isn't blacklisted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2309858
(btw, that link leads to a blank page for me, so I think it is blacklisted)
Great write-up! Basically a person that was using more than 20 years of Lisp successfully and considered Lisp allowing higher productivity admits that there are now other languages that allows higher productivity than Lisp. At the end when I read the comment: > I think that if Lisp does not evolve it will die, and I > don't want to see that happen. I still think Lisp is > great. I also think it can be, and should be,…
No, just a case of Stockholm Syndrome. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/d11c7e5619...
"I wonder what kind of improvements does the author have in his mind! If somebody knows please kindly enlighten me."
As Erik Naggum said: Erann Gat does not want to enhance Common Lisp, he [just] wants to feel better.
I encourage you to keep reading Naggum's line of thought: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9edc8f7ee2...
I don't speak for the author, but I had the feeling he would retract those remarks today, based on our exchanges here on HN. In other news, STFU and hack. Enough with Lisp politics posts. It's just a language.
Do you know of any startups using a LISP as the primary dev language?
PG's take on this subject: it's about beating the averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
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I think you summarized his reasons correctly, but I see his reasons as faulty. (1) assumes that if a technology is good, it will see steady adoption over time. This is not true. See "Why didn't the Romans have hot air ballons" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264998 About (2) I want to phrase my criticism carefully. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ron is a generally egotistical person, any more than your typical…
> (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.
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> (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.
When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)
No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would.
> Maybe those people are just really smart
You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
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When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)
> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would. > Maybe those people are just really smart You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
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When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)
> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would. > Maybe those people are just really smart You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
TLDR Person found out other people can be immensely productive with other languages. Then person learned languages X, Y and Z with cool libraries and is now very productive and happy using them. TLDR TLDR Libraries make a big difference!
Honestly, I'll probably get crucified for this, but: tl;dr it's possible to be a Blub programmer in Lisp.
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> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would. > Maybe those people are just really smart You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
This deserves more discussion. I won't be able to do it justice today, but hope to restart the discussion later, maybe with a comment on your blog.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...
(Submitted to HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314572 -- but it died with a whimper.)