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In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

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Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#71

Post by badfrog »

nnq wrote: post #53
s_Hogg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really, that's interesting. Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base and I'm an ignoramus or is it a case of some of the users of longer standing being vocal about Lisp?

> Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base Paul Graham's essays are widely known among the HN user base, especially the "Beating the Averages" [1] one. Some of those who've read it know a bit more about the deeper history. And others obsessed with the "10x programmer" myth and they randomly stumble upon Lisp as one of the many "magic oils" that are rumored to make one into such a mythical creature. It…

> Paul Graham's essays are widely known among the HN user base

I'm not sure that's true anymore. I think there's a much wider variety of people here now than 10 years ago.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#72

Post by _ph_ »

Annatar wrote: post #23
s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Because it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.

I have run a server software written in SBCL on Solaris for many years. In which sense is the Solaris support lacking?

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#73

Post by beezle »

nnq wrote: post #53
s_Hogg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really, that's interesting. Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base and I'm an ignoramus or is it a case of some of the users of longer standing being vocal about Lisp?

> Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base Paul Graham's essays are widely known among the HN user base, especially the "Beating the Averages" [1] one. Some of those who've read it know a bit more about the deeper history. And others obsessed with the "10x programmer" myth and they randomly stumble upon Lisp as one of the many "magic oils" that are rumored to make one into such a mythical creature. It…

Before today I did not know who Paul Graham was, what he had done or the lispy association to HN. Then again, I'm a few thousand miles from the Bay area and not much of one for keeping track of personalities in any field. Though I am of course interested in things 'tech' related for both work and personal reasons. Am I really in the minority of HN?

Any programmer benefits from exposure to language families other than the one that is their daily driver. Even within familiers there can be nuances and differences that are worth at least a passing thought. Probably applies to life in general too.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#74

Post by emit_time »

s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Is the second programming language to have existed, and it is still used for some applications. It has some unique properties, including _code is data_.

It is a functional language, and functional programming is making a comeback as well.

There's a lot to it.

I work at a company that used common lisp all the way down.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#75

Post by srean »

xrd wrote: post #64

I wrote a book for O'Reilly ( https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/ ) and I only say that because what I'll say next is controversial. First, there must be a huge market for technical books that don't appeal to Lisp fanatics. There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes, whi…

> There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes.

... and "the for Dummies" does not cater to them ? Or are you saying that O'Reilly should become somewhat more like the "Dummies" Series. Regardless of the name some of those books dont speak to the reader as if the reader is a dummy. Then there are those "21 days", "Unleashed".

I like it that O'Reilly speaks to me more than the "21 days" variety. Each to his own. I have been happy with Apress (other than Practical Ocaml) and Manning too. Packt is mostly an abomination.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#76

Post by dreamcompiler »

s_Hogg wrote: post #19
dreamcompiler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What organization hosts HN? From what computer science construct does that organization's name come from? Who founded that organization? How did that person get wealthy enough to start seed funding other companies? Did that person write not one, but two books on Common Lisp? Just some points to ponder.

Oh really, that's interesting. Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base and I'm an ignoramus or is it a case of some of the users of longer standing being vocal about Lisp?

You're probably not an ignoramus. You're probably just new here. No sin in that.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#77

Post by srean »

adriftincode wrote: post #63
klez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote but I don't think you're being downvoted for asking an honest question, but mostly because > I feel like hackers cling to the “if it’s not new, it’s not worthy” paradigm. is incorrect and reeks of an accusation of elitism which is not fair in this case.

I can see how it may have come off that way. It was my first thought as I’ve seen people get pretty exited about the new—rather than the old. Some thoughts are better kept to the self.

> as I’ve seen people get pretty exited about the new—rather than the old

Hardly a trait exclusive to hackers.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#78

Post by pjc50 »

toyg wrote: post #36
sireat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN exists because of LISP. More precisely PG attributed success of Viaweb to LISP (speed of iteration etc) http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I am pretty sure the key factor was having a small and talented team. It didn't have to be LISP. They could have used another language they were familiar with.

Even if you give LISP a role, one also has to consider that it was a time when the most popular languages (C++, early Java, Perl) were pretty low-level and not at all web-friendly or async-friendly. LISP could bridge that gap because it makes it very easy to build DSLs and "go up" in abstraction with minimal fuss. If you start with Python or Ruby and their popular frameworks, these days, most of that work is already…

Perl was extremely web-friendly: large amounts of the early web were written with CGI.pm or even Apache mod_perl.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#79

Post by Thiez »

emit_time wrote: post #74
s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Is the second programming language to have existed, and it is still used for some applications. It has some unique properties, including _code is data_. It is a functional language, and functional programming is making a comeback as well. There's a lot to it. I work at a company that used common lisp all the way down.

Is lisp really more functional than, say, Rust? I've tried it for a while but find Haskell much more pleasant to work with.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#80

Post by ken »

sireat wrote: post #17
s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

HN exists because of LISP. More precisely PG attributed success of Viaweb to LISP (speed of iteration etc) http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I am pretty sure the key factor was having a small and talented team. It didn't have to be LISP. They could have used another language they were familiar with.

I don't think "HN exists because of LISP" is the reason that Lisp posts are popular on HN today.

Viaweb also used GNU's compiler, ran on FreeBSD, and stored all data in flat files -- but those other choices aren't nearly as popular here (or in general practice) today.

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