Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Lisp Curse (2017)

winestockwebdesign.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 93 posts

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#2

Post by Flankk »

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling.

Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never need to use pointers.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#3

Post by vaylian »

Flankk wrote: post #2

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…

Webassembly might be the solution to your problem

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#4

Post by mtreis86 »

Flankk wrote: post #2

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…

On the opposite end, Common Lisp is actually pretty decent for bit twiddling. It has the operators from the PDP instruction set, LDB and DPB, which load and deposit bytes of varying length from and into other numbers.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#5

Post by [deleted] »

Flankk wrote: post #2

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…

[deleted]

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#6

Post by adregan »

OP posted despite the opening paragraph!

> Update on October 6, 2017. N.B.: Please stop submitting this to Hacker News! Look at the Hacker News search results for this essay. Check out the note for the first entry: Come on, everyone! Let's beat the dead horse one more time!

Past discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Lisp%20Curse&type=story&...

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#8

Post by bayesian_horse »

Flankk wrote: post #2

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…

Whoever says things like that probably means "appropriate" in the sense that you can get your stuff done with another language using a fraction of the implementation time.

And whoever wishes to use C++ on websites... who is stopping you since Webassembly? Speaking about ecosystems... I also don't think the package management ecosystem in C++ is that much better, right? And there are enough horror stories about illegibility and foot-guns even in modern C++ code, rivaling the worst YOLO frontend style...

C++ requires you to be a lot more verbose and precise for almost everything. That translates to more work, and the benefit isn't automatically worth anything.

Post reply on HN