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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#81

Post by attila-lendvai »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

yes. and as a long time lisper, i don't think that it's the macros.

i think lisp's magic is a lot more cultural than most people think. i.e. how lispnicks implement lisps and the ecosystem around it. how easy it is to walk the entire ladder of abstractions from machine code to project specific DSL's. how pluggable its parsing pipeline is -- something that is not even exposed in most languages, let alone customizable.

the language, the foundation, of course matters. but i think to a lesser extent than what people think. (hence the trend of trying to hire lispnicks to hard, but non-lisp positions?)

and it's not even an obviously good culture... (just how abrasive common lispers are? need to have a thick skin if you ask a stupid question... or that grumpy, pervasive spirit of the lone wolf...?)

maybe it's just a peculiar filter that gets together peculiar people who think and write code in peculiar ways.

maybe it's not the macros, but the patterns in personality traits of the people who end up at lisp?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#82

Post by zarzavat »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

There are several languages that I could use and be economically successful with, but I refuse to use because I consider them to be poorly designed.

Using a bad language for 8 hours a day makes me irritable and it's impossible to prevent that irritability from overflowing into my interactions with other people. I'd rather that my conversations with the computer be joyful ones.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#83

Post by Chinjut »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #25
ModernMech wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced. The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really abo…

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

Why are we limiting ourselves to business concepts?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#84

Post by attila-lendvai »

chromaton wrote: post #15

Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.

this assumes that greatness is a single dimension, and namely, popularity.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#85

Post by anthk »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Me with TCL instead of Python. TCL is the weird Unixy cousing. Instead of cons cells and lists, you get lists and strings.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#86

Post by attila-lendvai »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #77
xigoi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming that people choose languages based on merit and not based on how much money someone will give them for using them.

You're assuming something better on merit wouldn't make more money as a result, and I'm questioning the actual merits as a result

the silent assumption in both of your perspectives is that the current monetary system is an even playing field when it comes to this context (corporations and their programmers)

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#87

Post by attila-lendvai »

bccdee wrote: post #71
evdubs wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python. Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions…

That's a bad thing, though. You should not be `eval`-ing your config file, much less untrusted messages.

you don't need to call eval for the usual config file setup, only read.

(but you often get something much better when config files are plain lisp code; i.e. they are eval'ed, assuming that the threat model allows it)

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#88

Post by zahlman »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Reading SICP (and other such mind expansion) has definitely (gradually over a very long period) shaped how I write Python.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#89

Post by mlinhares »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Most of the time when someone adds these fancy languages what happens is that they leave and the ones left are the ones that have to deal with the shit that was produced.

I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolutely no good reason, i try to kill it as fast as possible.

I don't want to be the victim of this code in the future or have my team bear the cost of maintaining stuff they don't understand.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#90

Post by antonvs »

nathan_compton wrote: post #37

Big lisp guy here. Have written tens of thousands of lines of scheme, at least, and common lisp. But I don't get this "Lisp is so much better than everything else," thing. It feels very jejune to me. Most lisp programmers barely use macros and most programming languages these days have most of the features of Lisp that originally made it useful (automatic memory management, repls, dynamic typing*, and even meta-progr…

> If I had one thing I want fixed about Scheme it would be the dynamic typing

The ML family or Haskell fit that bill. Both OCaml and Haskell also have an equivalent of macro systems. So does e.g. Rust, for that matter.

I agree with your main point. The attitude you’re referring to is largely a relic of a previous era, at this point.

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