8 ms·

The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

102 points by olieidel 10y ago

diminishedprime 10y ago
While the "BBM" tends to work alone and be frustrated at artiface at every corner, when you get a few or more working together, some really great things can come together. I've experienced that firsthand.
- atemerev 10y ago
  These great things will still remain unfinished at 90% completion ;) (Been there, done that. Feeling incredibly sad after reading this article).
0wl3x 10y ago
excuse my ignorance, but other than emacs, what are the uses of LISP?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  All of them, it's a family of general-purpose programming languages :). From older uses, you have Lisp in Gimp, Audacity, several AAA video games by Naughty Dog, in AutoCAD and few other recognizable places. Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp, later rewritten to Python. More recently, Clojure (a Lisp for JVM and CLR) is gaining popularity in the Java world, and a lot of startups are using it. Hacker News itself is written in Lisp, BTW.
  - joncampbelldev 10y ago
    Java dev here, just to add that coding in clojure is bringing joy back to my daily working life. I've introduced it into a couple of projects, the simplicity and flexibility are an amazing productivity boost. Some of that comes from clojure specifically, but the lisp syntax and macros are a big part of it.
- blablabla123 10y ago
  I think this forum is written in some LISP dialect^^
  - pkd 10y ago
    Yes, made by Paul Graham. Called Arc. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- gkya 10y ago
  There are companies selling Common Lisp interpreters and IDEs. So certainly there are lots of users out there. Many major Lisps (CL, Clojure, Scheme, Racket) are general purpose languages, and in common they excell at metaprogramming, interactive programming and control flow/debugging (see CL restarts).
  - eschaton 10y ago
    Don't say "interpreter" if you don't mean it. In the vast majority of cases, Common Lisp is a compiled language.
    - gkya 10y ago
      It's an interpreted one in the sense that one can continually interact with it during the life time of a program. Many of the popular interpreted languages nowadays do some compilation somewhere (Python, Perl, etc).
- zengid 10y ago
  I'm an amateur LISP hacker and not an expert, and I hope this thread doesn't turn into a flame war, but I can say that LISP is excellent for symbolic computations (a la lambda calculus, which Turing proved was equivalent to a Turing Machine) [1]. If you're more familiar with C languages, I like to think of LISP as the C of symbolic languages. It has practically no syntax, and LISP (as it exists today) has the neat feature that it's data structures are the same as its programs. Writing LISP code that modifies and generates other LISP code is relatively simple compared to doing the same in a syntax-rich language. LISP does all of this at its lowest level, just like how C manipulates the fundamental elements of a CPU (pointers, contiguous memory blocks, basic arithmetic / logic operations, etc). The way CPU's are designed revolves around the Von Neumann Architecture [2], and C exploits this design very well. Unfortunately, LISP doesn't quite match this architecture, so it has traditionally performed poorly compared to C. But CPU's could certainly be designed to operate around a LISP-like model[3], so the Von Neumann paradigm isn't the only way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
  - steinuil 10y ago
    > Unfortunately, LISP doesn't quite match [the Von Neumann] architecture, so it has traditionally performed poorly compared to C. Exactly. It has traditionally performed poorly compared to C, but this hasn't been the case for a lot of time. There's a number of misconceptions about what is and what is not a lisp. First of all, a lisp doesn't have to be interpreted or run in a virtual machine. While this is true for a lot of lisps, Common Lisp performs what you could call just-in-time compilation: you can even inspect the compiled code of a function by calling the `disassemble' macro on it, and optimize it based on the disassembly. A lisp doesn't have to be dynamically typed. There are many examples of statically typed lisps (Shen, Dylan, Typed Racket, Lux), and in other dynamically typed lisps such as Common Lisp you can add type annotations as needed to optimize functions. A lisp doesn't have to be garbage collected. It certainly is more convenient to have GC when you have such a dynamic language or want to program in a functional style; however, this is not required. Carp and GOAL[0] do not use garbage collection, and in Common Lisp you can generally give hints to the garbage collector to to make it run where you need it to. A lisp doesn't have to be functional! While lisps usually advocate a functional style to varying degrees (mutation in Scheme is usually marked with a ! in the name of the function (set!) but normally discouraged, Clojure is immutable by default IIRC), but very few are purely functional (only Lux comes to mind) and most are in fact very procedural (Common Lisp). Finally, Common Lisp has been designed to also be used as a systems language, and thus benefits from many optimizations targeting the Von Neumann architecture that can make it just as fast, if not faster, than C. This is a good post detailing some of the optimizations that you can perform in Common Lisp: https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/advanced-c-lisp/convergence-of-modern-cplusplus-and-lisp/ https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/advanced-c-lisp/converge... To answer 0wl3x's question, lisps can be used for just about anything; it's just a family of homoiconic languages that generally make heavy use of macros as fundamental abstractions. [0] http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/disassembling-jak/ http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/disassembling-jak/
- parfe 10y ago
  Lisps can do anything other general purpose language can accomplish. People still overwhelmingly choose other languages.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Lisps != lisp programs. Lisp lets programmers treat their code as data to be edited at runtime. Which is a different model than say Java. The advantage is individual programmers can be more productive, but it becomes really hard to share code as every program evolves into it's own language.
  - progman 10y ago
    When C++ and Java (the current industry standards) have adopted the last feature of Lisp then the world will realize that it actually wanted Lisp after all :-)
- malcolmstill 10y ago
  I'm writing a Wayland compositor in Common Lisp: https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis
  - zeveb 10y ago
    I'm really, really excited by that, BTW. Gonna wait a few months before I try to use it for real, but it'll be fun to have a new Common Lisp environment. As long as there's a tiling mode, I'm there:-)
- openfuture 10y ago
  Run guixSD with stumpwm and emacs. Guix (the package manager) is in guile lisp, Shepherd (the init system) is in guile as well iirc, stumpwm (window manager) is common lisp and emacs is elisp.
- imgabe 10y ago
  Much of ITA's matrix software, which controlled airline ticket pricing, was written in Common Lisp. I don't know if that's still the case since Google bought it, but I imagine it would be pretty difficult to port a codebase that large and complex to a different language.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  Others have already pointed out that this very forum's implemented in Arc, a Lisp dialect. Some large projects implemented in Lisp: Operating systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) Travel industry software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software Computer games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot Common sense reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc and plenty more http://franz.com/success/ http://franz.com/success/ I'm using Lisp to implement a visual dataflow programming language http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html
- crispytx 10y ago
  Hacker News is written in LISP.
- kelvin0 10y ago
  You should ask Paul Graham, and his (first?) successful startup he sold to Yahoo: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html So, pretty useful IMHO.
chriswarbo 10y ago
Wow, this felt like an eerily accurate cold reading! I'm currently waiting for some Racket tests to finish, and this morning I tutored a C/C++ programming lab. The other lab tutor is a C++ hacker, and was saying how the course this year is much better than when he took it, since they had to do it in Lisp ;)
JamesLeonis 10y ago
I find it interesting that Clojure (and LISPs in general) have enjoyed an upsurge of attention since this 20th anniversary post. Maybe we're in the mania phase? As an anecdote, I've now been on both language spectrums. In large C++ projects I can absolutely attest to the "Needs many people" claim. Now that I've worked in Clojure on projects of equal importance, it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Many of modern IDE features go back to Lisp and Smalltalk workstations. Yet they still don't offer all their capabilities. Had those environments succeed in the market, the whole development experience workflow would be much better. Think of Bret Viktor style presentations. Sadly due to their prices, many know Common Lisp via the open source command line compilers, instead of environments that trace back to those workstations like Franz Common Lisp.
- progman 10y ago
  > it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone which proves that Lisp and the "bipolar Lisp programmer" are not necessarily related together. I think BBM's prefer Lisp because it is really convenient to develop without having to be dependent on others. C++ may be considered a "social" language, however I discovered that it is not the language itself which encourages social development but some coders make so silly mistakes that they actually need the help of others to fix them. For instance, some devs open files without closing them, etc. I wonder if those people would actually write cleaner code with Lisp because such silly mistakes are not so easy in Lisp due to is structured programming (with-open-file ...). Also buffer overflows and the like are much harder to accomplish in Lisp than in C++. Some devs, in particular Edi Weitz and the quicklisp authors are evidence that Lisp preference and social interest are not mutually exclusive. http://weitz.de/lisp.html http://weitz.de/lisp.html
matheusmoreira 10y ago
I think the article describes ADHD rather than bipolar disorder. Selective attention, difficulty finishing what was started, poor fit for the current educational paradigms... Sounds like ADHD to me. There's nothing in the article that can be characterized as mania. It's still one of my favorite posts though. Really resonated with me the first time I read it and I think it's just as relevant today.
- Jemmeh 10y ago
  They can both sometimes have those problems. Both can lead to the feeling of overstimulation which can lead to the same focus issues. For example, "So much is going on I can't pick which to pay attention to".
  - matheusmoreira 10y ago
    Mania manifests with signs that don't match those of ADHD. Among the criteria¹ that characterize a manic episode, only one is directly related to ADHD: >abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood >increased self-esteem or grandiosity >decreased need for sleep >more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking >flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing >distractibility >increase in goal-directed activity or psychomotor agitation >excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences ADHD and manic episode, in more concrete terms: >disorganized, forgets about appointments, loses stuff, puts off chores and homework, can't sit still for too long, suddenly gets up when not supposed to, finishes other people's sentences, doesn't listen when talked to, can't wait for their turn, interrupts busy people, can't pay attention at all in boring classes, mind thinks about anything but the boring task at hand, makes careless mistakes during exams, suddenly finds something interesting to do and works on it all day, finishes the awesome parts of projects then drops them when only the boring stuff remains, highly distracted by noise and background activity >grandiose delusions concerning own intelligence, potential and abilities, talks about them at length, becomes highly irritated if contested, thoughts race and feels like brain can't process them, thinks he can do anything (like flying) and engages in high risk behavior as result, sleeps 2 hours then goes jogging at 3 AM unable to understand why everybody else is so slow, relentlessly pursues goals and sexual interests to the point of indiscretion, displays exceptionally poor judgement ¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64063/#_A92654_ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64063/#_A92654_
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ontoillogical 10y ago
I've used this essay as a justification to myself for why I got bad marks so many times. Dropping this self-assessment was a big part of what "growing up" felt like to me.
- alimw 10y ago
  It's funny how there's glamour attached to the idea of being a BBM. It's not like it tends to end well in practice.
- nonsince 10y ago
  But I don't think this article is trying to say "this type of person is great but society keeps them down, man". Or at least, that's not how I read it. The author explicitly says that the failure comes from lack of application.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
Lots of those kind of people right here on the hacker news forums.
- zengid 10y ago
  Existential proof by contraposition: I would attempt to disprove you, but I don't wish to sit up from the couch or put down my guitar. Therefore, you are correct (about me at least).
  - zengid 10y ago
    Sorry, Proof by *Contradiction. That's what I get for fooling around with math.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> He can see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his resources are insufficient. Oh give it a rest already. You're talking about someone who can't finish anything, and won't even bother to document his half-arsed, half-baked code, as a "brilliant" mind? And on the basis of, what? That he (it's always a he, in the article) used to get good grades at school. Not even university, mind- the brilliance lasted until high school. But, you know, it's all because that brilliant mind was such a great non-conformist who could see through all us phonies. The only thing missing is a magical ring and a birthmark that, once deciphered using the ring, reads "Only You Can Save the World™". I won't bother to say where the birthmark is and how the ring fits it. As if we didn't have enough trouble already with rockstars and ninjas and people thinking they're artists because they wrote their first for-loop...
- kosma 10y ago
  You're confusing someone too talented for their own good with a self-entitled asshole. Being a bipolar programmer is not glamorous, and certainly not a point of pride; if anything, it's extremely hard and frustrating - not just code-wise, but life-wise.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  Yeah, clearly the author chose to label this personality type with a mental disorder because they think it's awesome. Who wouldn't want to be bipolar? The bipolar ninja, that's got a certain ring to it doesn't it? Did you read to the end? The point, stated explicitly is that the BBM mindset is problematic: > So what's the message in all of this? Basically, that there are two problems. The problem with the Lisp mindset and the problem with Lisp. The problem of the Lisp mindset is the problem of the mindset characteristic of the BBM. I'm not sure what your cutoff for 'brilliant' is, but being able to ace high school without working probably makes you 1 in 50. From the point of view of a teacher calling the top student in a grade 'brilliant' is not a huge stretch. Of course, if you go to a demanding program in a good university, this level of 'brilliance' is commonplace. It seems to me the author sees some beauty in this type of mind, but it doesn't mean they think you should try to be that way. I can understand that; because I see beauty in fragility too; for whatever reason, I have a soft spot for people with anxiety problems, and I try to reach out and help them. I think there is something brilliant about (some of) them, but it doesn't mean I think they are better than others. Having anxiety makes life harder, as does having the personality described in this article.
cousin_it 10y ago
I think finishing projects is a learnable skill, not a fixed personality trait. It can be learned in quite a short time by repeatedly doing one-day projects and making them as finished as you can.
- petra 10y ago
  One day seems easy. How does that transfer to keeping an interest in long project(months/years) ?
  - deleted 10y ago
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- progman 10y ago
  One way to learn such discipline is "learning by teaching". If you learn something, and if you want to learn it really well, then learn it so that you can teach it to others.
TurboHaskal 10y ago
Ah, I used to love this article back then during my Lisp honey moon. Today it reads like fedora tipping neckbeard porn.
joeevans1000 10y ago
Well, now we have Clojure, ClojureScript, and projects like Untangled. Is Lisp on its meds now? PS - I agree it should have been titled 'The ADHD Lisp Programmer'
- kosma 10y ago
  It's the other way round. It's a specific kind of personality that's easily attracted to Lisp, not a programming language that makes you special.
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cLeEOGPw 10y ago
Article main points: 1. Mental disorder (bipolar or ADHD) is also beneficial for a person (brilliant bipolar mind). 2. There's nothing wrong with LISP language, only with people who use it.
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102 points by olieidel 10y ago

While the "BBM" tends to work alone and be frustrated at artiface at every corner, when you get a few or more working together, some really great things can come together. I've experienced that firsthand.

atemerev 10y ago
These great things will still remain unfinished at 90% completion ;) (Been there, done that. Feeling incredibly sad after reading this article).

0wl3x 10y ago

excuse my ignorance, but other than emacs, what are the uses of LISP?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
All of them, it's a family of general-purpose programming languages :). From older uses, you have Lisp in Gimp, Audacity, several AAA video games by Naughty Dog, in AutoCAD and few other recognizable places. Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp, later rewritten to Python. More recently, Clojure (a Lisp for JVM and CLR) is gaining popularity in the Java world, and a lot of startups are using it. Hacker News itself is written in Lisp, BTW.
- joncampbelldev 10y ago
  Java dev here, just to add that coding in clojure is bringing joy back to my daily working life. I've introduced it into a couple of projects, the simplicity and flexibility are an amazing productivity boost. Some of that comes from clojure specifically, but the lisp syntax and macros are a big part of it.
blablabla123 10y ago
I think this forum is written in some LISP dialect^^
- pkd 10y ago
  Yes, made by Paul Graham. Called Arc. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
gkya 10y ago
There are companies selling Common Lisp interpreters and IDEs. So certainly there are lots of users out there. Many major Lisps (CL, Clojure, Scheme, Racket) are general purpose languages, and in common they excell at metaprogramming, interactive programming and control flow/debugging (see CL restarts).
- eschaton 10y ago
  Don't say "interpreter" if you don't mean it. In the vast majority of cases, Common Lisp is a compiled language.
  - gkya 10y ago
    It's an interpreted one in the sense that one can continually interact with it during the life time of a program. Many of the popular interpreted languages nowadays do some compilation somewhere (Python, Perl, etc).
zengid 10y ago
I'm an amateur LISP hacker and not an expert, and I hope this thread doesn't turn into a flame war, but I can say that LISP is excellent for symbolic computations (a la lambda calculus, which Turing proved was equivalent to a Turing Machine) [1]. If you're more familiar with C languages, I like to think of LISP as the C of symbolic languages. It has practically no syntax, and LISP (as it exists today) has the neat feature that it's data structures are the same as its programs. Writing LISP code that modifies and generates other LISP code is relatively simple compared to doing the same in a syntax-rich language. LISP does all of this at its lowest level, just like how C manipulates the fundamental elements of a CPU (pointers, contiguous memory blocks, basic arithmetic / logic operations, etc). The way CPU's are designed revolves around the Von Neumann Architecture [2], and C exploits this design very well. Unfortunately, LISP doesn't quite match this architecture, so it has traditionally performed poorly compared to C. But CPU's could certainly be designed to operate around a LISP-like model[3], so the Von Neumann paradigm isn't the only way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
- steinuil 10y ago
  > Unfortunately, LISP doesn't quite match [the Von Neumann] architecture, so it has traditionally performed poorly compared to C. Exactly. It has traditionally performed poorly compared to C, but this hasn't been the case for a lot of time. There's a number of misconceptions about what is and what is not a lisp. First of all, a lisp doesn't have to be interpreted or run in a virtual machine. While this is true for a lot of lisps, Common Lisp performs what you could call just-in-time compilation: you can even inspect the compiled code of a function by calling the `disassemble' macro on it, and optimize it based on the disassembly. A lisp doesn't have to be dynamically typed. There are many examples of statically typed lisps (Shen, Dylan, Typed Racket, Lux), and in other dynamically typed lisps such as Common Lisp you can add type annotations as needed to optimize functions. A lisp doesn't have to be garbage collected. It certainly is more convenient to have GC when you have such a dynamic language or want to program in a functional style; however, this is not required. Carp and GOAL[0] do not use garbage collection, and in Common Lisp you can generally give hints to the garbage collector to to make it run where you need it to. A lisp doesn't have to be functional! While lisps usually advocate a functional style to varying degrees (mutation in Scheme is usually marked with a ! in the name of the function (set!) but normally discouraged, Clojure is immutable by default IIRC), but very few are purely functional (only Lux comes to mind) and most are in fact very procedural (Common Lisp). Finally, Common Lisp has been designed to also be used as a systems language, and thus benefits from many optimizations targeting the Von Neumann architecture that can make it just as fast, if not faster, than C. This is a good post detailing some of the optimizations that you can perform in Common Lisp: https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/advanced-c-lisp/convergence-of-modern-cplusplus-and-lisp/ https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/advanced-c-lisp/converge... To answer 0wl3x's question, lisps can be used for just about anything; it's just a family of homoiconic languages that generally make heavy use of macros as fundamental abstractions. [0] http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/disassembling-jak/ http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/disassembling-jak/
parfe 10y ago
Lisps can do anything other general purpose language can accomplish. People still overwhelmingly choose other languages.
- Retric 10y ago
  Lisps != lisp programs. Lisp lets programmers treat their code as data to be edited at runtime. Which is a different model than say Java. The advantage is individual programmers can be more productive, but it becomes really hard to share code as every program evolves into it's own language.
- progman 10y ago
  When C++ and Java (the current industry standards) have adopted the last feature of Lisp then the world will realize that it actually wanted Lisp after all :-)
malcolmstill 10y ago
I'm writing a Wayland compositor in Common Lisp: https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis
- zeveb 10y ago
  I'm really, really excited by that, BTW. Gonna wait a few months before I try to use it for real, but it'll be fun to have a new Common Lisp environment. As long as there's a tiling mode, I'm there:-)
openfuture 10y ago
Run guixSD with stumpwm and emacs. Guix (the package manager) is in guile lisp, Shepherd (the init system) is in guile as well iirc, stumpwm (window manager) is common lisp and emacs is elisp.
imgabe 10y ago
Much of ITA's matrix software, which controlled airline ticket pricing, was written in Common Lisp. I don't know if that's still the case since Google bought it, but I imagine it would be pretty difficult to port a codebase that large and complex to a different language.
DonaldFisk 10y ago
Others have already pointed out that this very forum's implemented in Arc, a Lisp dialect. Some large projects implemented in Lisp: Operating systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) Travel industry software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software Computer games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot Common sense reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc and plenty more http://franz.com/success/ http://franz.com/success/ I'm using Lisp to implement a visual dataflow programming language http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html
crispytx 10y ago
Hacker News is written in LISP.
kelvin0 10y ago
You should ask Paul Graham, and his (first?) successful startup he sold to Yahoo: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html So, pretty useful IMHO.

chriswarbo 10y ago

Wow, this felt like an eerily accurate cold reading! I'm currently waiting for some Racket tests to finish, and this morning I tutored a C/C++ programming lab. The other lab tutor is a C++ hacker, and was saying how the course this year is much better than when he took it, since they had to do it in Lisp ;)

JamesLeonis 10y ago

I find it interesting that Clojure (and LISPs in general) have enjoyed an upsurge of attention since this 20th anniversary post. Maybe we're in the mania phase? As an anecdote, I've now been on both language spectrums. In large C++ projects I can absolutely attest to the "Needs many people" claim. Now that I've worked in Clojure on projects of equal importance, it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone.

pjmlp 10y ago
Many of modern IDE features go back to Lisp and Smalltalk workstations. Yet they still don't offer all their capabilities. Had those environments succeed in the market, the whole development experience workflow would be much better. Think of Bret Viktor style presentations. Sadly due to their prices, many know Common Lisp via the open source command line compilers, instead of environments that trace back to those workstations like Franz Common Lisp.
progman 10y ago
> it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone which proves that Lisp and the "bipolar Lisp programmer" are not necessarily related together. I think BBM's prefer Lisp because it is really convenient to develop without having to be dependent on others. C++ may be considered a "social" language, however I discovered that it is not the language itself which encourages social development but some coders make so silly mistakes that they actually need the help of others to fix them. For instance, some devs open files without closing them, etc. I wonder if those people would actually write cleaner code with Lisp because such silly mistakes are not so easy in Lisp due to is structured programming (with-open-file ...). Also buffer overflows and the like are much harder to accomplish in Lisp than in C++. Some devs, in particular Edi Weitz and the quicklisp authors are evidence that Lisp preference and social interest are not mutually exclusive. http://weitz.de/lisp.html http://weitz.de/lisp.html

matheusmoreira 10y ago

I think the article describes ADHD rather than bipolar disorder. Selective attention, difficulty finishing what was started, poor fit for the current educational paradigms... Sounds like ADHD to me. There's nothing in the article that can be characterized as mania. It's still one of my favorite posts though. Really resonated with me the first time I read it and I think it's just as relevant today.

Jemmeh 10y ago
They can both sometimes have those problems. Both can lead to the feeling of overstimulation which can lead to the same focus issues. For example, "So much is going on I can't pick which to pay attention to".
- matheusmoreira 10y ago
  Mania manifests with signs that don't match those of ADHD. Among the criteria¹ that characterize a manic episode, only one is directly related to ADHD: >abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood >increased self-esteem or grandiosity >decreased need for sleep >more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking >flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing >distractibility >increase in goal-directed activity or psychomotor agitation >excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences ADHD and manic episode, in more concrete terms: >disorganized, forgets about appointments, loses stuff, puts off chores and homework, can't sit still for too long, suddenly gets up when not supposed to, finishes other people's sentences, doesn't listen when talked to, can't wait for their turn, interrupts busy people, can't pay attention at all in boring classes, mind thinks about anything but the boring task at hand, makes careless mistakes during exams, suddenly finds something interesting to do and works on it all day, finishes the awesome parts of projects then drops them when only the boring stuff remains, highly distracted by noise and background activity >grandiose delusions concerning own intelligence, potential and abilities, talks about them at length, becomes highly irritated if contested, thoughts race and feels like brain can't process them, thinks he can do anything (like flying) and engages in high risk behavior as result, sleeps 2 hours then goes jogging at 3 AM unable to understand why everybody else is so slow, relentlessly pursues goals and sexual interests to the point of indiscretion, displays exceptionally poor judgement ¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64063/#_A92654_ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64063/#_A92654_

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ontoillogical 10y ago

I've used this essay as a justification to myself for why I got bad marks so many times. Dropping this self-assessment was a big part of what "growing up" felt like to me.

alimw 10y ago
It's funny how there's glamour attached to the idea of being a BBM. It's not like it tends to end well in practice.
nonsince 10y ago
But I don't think this article is trying to say "this type of person is great but society keeps them down, man". Or at least, that's not how I read it. The author explicitly says that the failure comes from lack of application.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

Lots of those kind of people right here on the hacker news forums.

zengid 10y ago
Existential proof by contraposition: I would attempt to disprove you, but I don't wish to sit up from the couch or put down my guitar. Therefore, you are correct (about me at least).
- zengid 10y ago
  Sorry, Proof by *Contradiction. That's what I get for fooling around with math.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> He can see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his resources are insufficient. Oh give it a rest already. You're talking about someone who can't finish anything, and won't even bother to document his half-arsed, half-baked code, as a "brilliant" mind? And on the basis of, what? That he (it's always a he, in the article) used to get good grades at school. Not even university, mind- the brilliance lasted until high school. But, you know, it's all because that brilliant mind was such a great non-conformist who could see through all us phonies. The only thing missing is a magical ring and a birthmark that, once deciphered using the ring, reads "Only You Can Save the World™". I won't bother to say where the birthmark is and how the ring fits it. As if we didn't have enough trouble already with rockstars and ninjas and people thinking they're artists because they wrote their first for-loop...

kosma 10y ago
You're confusing someone too talented for their own good with a self-entitled asshole. Being a bipolar programmer is not glamorous, and certainly not a point of pride; if anything, it's extremely hard and frustrating - not just code-wise, but life-wise.
greenshackle2 10y ago
Yeah, clearly the author chose to label this personality type with a mental disorder because they think it's awesome. Who wouldn't want to be bipolar? The bipolar ninja, that's got a certain ring to it doesn't it? Did you read to the end? The point, stated explicitly is that the BBM mindset is problematic: > So what's the message in all of this? Basically, that there are two problems. The problem with the Lisp mindset and the problem with Lisp. The problem of the Lisp mindset is the problem of the mindset characteristic of the BBM. I'm not sure what your cutoff for 'brilliant' is, but being able to ace high school without working probably makes you 1 in 50. From the point of view of a teacher calling the top student in a grade 'brilliant' is not a huge stretch. Of course, if you go to a demanding program in a good university, this level of 'brilliance' is commonplace. It seems to me the author sees some beauty in this type of mind, but it doesn't mean they think you should try to be that way. I can understand that; because I see beauty in fragility too; for whatever reason, I have a soft spot for people with anxiety problems, and I try to reach out and help them. I think there is something brilliant about (some of) them, but it doesn't mean I think they are better than others. Having anxiety makes life harder, as does having the personality described in this article.

cousin_it 10y ago

I think finishing projects is a learnable skill, not a fixed personality trait. It can be learned in quite a short time by repeatedly doing one-day projects and making them as finished as you can.

petra 10y ago
One day seems easy. How does that transfer to keeping an interest in long project(months/years) ?
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progman 10y ago
One way to learn such discipline is "learning by teaching". If you learn something, and if you want to learn it really well, then learn it so that you can teach it to others.

TurboHaskal 10y ago

Ah, I used to love this article back then during my Lisp honey moon. Today it reads like fedora tipping neckbeard porn.

joeevans1000 10y ago

Well, now we have Clojure, ClojureScript, and projects like Untangled. Is Lisp on its meds now? PS - I agree it should have been titled 'The ADHD Lisp Programmer'

kosma 10y ago
It's the other way round. It's a specific kind of personality that's easily attracted to Lisp, not a programming language that makes you special.
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cLeEOGPw 10y ago

Article main points: 1. Mental disorder (bipolar or ADHD) is also beneficial for a person (brilliant bipolar mind). 2. There's nothing wrong with LISP language, only with people who use it.

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