71–80 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...
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…
> cl.exe Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8804 for 80x86 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998. All rights reserved.
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.
Perhaps, but you are the person who prepended 'mere' in front of plumbing.
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…
* Multi-paradigm programming (functional programming in the immutable sense is not dominant, the Lisp OOP system is top class, mutable state can be everywhere)
* Rich looping mechanisms that don't require tail call contortions
* Explicit typing that leads to optimized code and compile time warnings! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389287)
* Warnings at compile time (not run time!) about things like undefined functions/vars/wrong args/unused vars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780381)
* A pretty good set of libraries et al that (once you set up quicklisp) are just a function call away from trying out (https://notabug.org/CodyReichert/awesome-cl)
* (edit: one more since I like it a lot) Out of the box the Lisp system contains features you have to get from IDEs in other languages like breakpoints, tracing, inspection, code location questions like "who calls foo"... of course working with that system via emacs or something is nicer but it's basically all there in the base system (http://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/)
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…
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…
Apart from that I haven't seen any thing in Python that makes code more readable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "actual software development" and "plumbing" is elitist, Perhaps, but you are the person who prepended 'mere' in front of plumbing.
Now I use Lisp nearly everywhere in a form of a small .NET runtime module.
Lisp is excellent at templating tasks. Just for comparison: StringTemplate for .NET is a whooping 400 kB of compiled binary code while my implementation of Lisp is just 35 kB (!). Sure enough, Lisp does the very same thing as StringTemplate, but in just 1/10 of the code. There is more: Lisp is Turing-complete while StringTemplate doesn't. I can add a .NET function to Lisp environment and then call it in my template. I cannot do that with StringTemplate. I repeat, this is a 35 kB Lisp David vs 400 kB StringTemplate Goliath.
Isn't Lisp beautiful?
But wait, there is more. Lisp is excellent for natural language processing because you can intersperse a human text with Lisp. Suppose the first % character enters into Lisp mode and subsequent % character exits back to text. The example of Lisp NLP would then look like:
"Hello %name%. It is time to do some math. Assume A + B = %(+ a b)%. What is the value of A when B is %b% ?"
env["name"] = "David";
env["a"] = 15;
env["b"] = 85;
"Hello David. It is time to do some math. Assume A + B = 100. What is the value of A when B is 85 ?"
Lisp is small as the Universe before Big Bang. Nevertheless it provides nearly endless possibilities when you have a need, a fit and imagination for them.
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.
You are correct - however, it doesn't mean that this statement is necessarily wrong.
Usually when I see a statement that reeks of elitism, I immediately assume lower probability of it being true, because elitism of a statement correlates with falsehood - but it's worth remembering that this correlation is not absolute, and sometimes (although rare), elitism is indeed deserved and true. And in this particular case, out of my personal professional experience, elitism is absolutely deserved. There are a lots and lots of software engineers out there that can't or just won't fit more complex ideas into their minds.
And yet, you are of course, correct: these developers can, and will, do good work. They can have different skills, like knowing the users, or creating beautiful animations, or having a great game design sense. These developers don't need to be looked down upon. And yet it would be very useful for all of us to acknowledge that these developers think in a different way and require different tools - they're not "worse" than "real" engineers, but they are different.
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…