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Before people go around upvoting this article mindlessly. This article is from 2008, before Brian rewrote this blog twice in Clojure and got the hell off WordPr

Before people go around upvoting this article mindlessly. This article is from 2008, before Brian rewrote this blog twice in Clojure and got the hell off WordPress. I'd be interested to hear what he has to say now about this article (though it may be that his opinion has remained largely the same).

mechanical_fish 16y ago
This remains a big problem with the web: Timelessness. It turns out that the ephemeral nature of offline commentary is a big feature. If I say something offhand in a bar I don't have to curate that statement forever, going back every few months to add some editorial comment about how my opinion has changed. It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard work - which it is - but that history is a terrible burden for the living. You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you. It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that it biodegrades. Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jherdman 16y ago
  How is this a problem with the web any more than anything? As soon as a thought leaves your mind and is engraved on some sort of medium (be it someone's memory, paper, or a webpage) it's out there for good. Publishing thoughts on web, like print, demands rigour from the author and the reader. Read actively, write like you have an audience, and be skeptical.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    As soon as a thought leaves your mind... it's out there for good. This is another mindset endemic to engineers like myself: First-order thinking. The notion that, because a bit in a piece of flash RAM, a memory in someone's brain, and an etching on the wall of a thousand-year-old church are all the same to first order -- "persistent" storage of information -- they can therefore safely be treated as the same thing. The second-order differences are pretty important. To pick just one particular example: Human memory is not just an incredibly fallable medium (you remember events that never happened, and your memory of events that did happen gets distorted over time and is situational, dependent on your current mood) but it is inevitably filtered through the personality of the rememberer. The only way to learn what a World War II veteran remembers about the war is to listen to what the veteran tells you. If the veteran happens to have been a personal friend of General Patton, they will tell you certain things about Patton. If the veteran was a sworn enemy of Patton, they will tell you other things about Patton. If you strive to prevent them from doing this consciously, they will do so unconsciously. Such is the nature of human memory and communication. A photograph of Patton, or a written memoir, is an entirely different beast. And, similarly, there is a big qualitative difference between a third-hand account of a conversation in a bar, an entry in a handwritten diary that is stored in your basement someplace, and a popular web page that has been downloaded a thousand times and is available on Bittorrent in case the original is taken down.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Web publishers take one kind of preservation seriously: many don't put dates on anything, hoping that readers will mistake it for fresh content.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I love the 'recent results' options in search engines for that reason.
briancarper 16y ago
My opinion today is largely the same, yes. I love Clojure and in my spare time I use it for everything. If I tried to do a web app in Common Lisp again, I'd probably have an easier time of it today than in 2008, because I know a bit more. But I couldn't justify using either for a project for work. I generally choose Ruby instead nowadays. In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it. We have seemingly constant threads on HN saying "I can't hire a good programmer!" What are the chances of my non-programmer boss hiring a good Lisp programmer? At the small non-profit at which I work? Good freaking luck. I'm still using some PHP scripts at work today, and I still cringe to see the code, and I whine a little (to myself) whenever I have to edit it, and my boss still loves the end result, and it's done its job well for 2 years. What else matters? I believe in "Worse is Better" in this case. I do sneakily use Clojure at work for small data-munging tasks. But not for code anyone else ever needs to see. (I do also wonder why this blog post from 2008 made it to HN.)
- sedachv 16y ago
  "In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it." How do you think these Ruby libraries got written?
  - cageface 16y ago
    How do you think these Ruby libraries got written? This is the crucial point. Take it a step further and ask yourself why? There are 10x as many potential library writers for Ruby/Python etc because it's 10x easier to get up to speed in those languages. If you want to put Clojure in the spotlight don't use it to build redundant, half-assed solutions to problems that are already solved. Use it to solve a new problem. Companies like Runa and BackType and Flightcaster are setting the right example here.
    - sedachv 16y ago

mechanical_fish 16y ago

This remains a big problem with the web: Timelessness. It turns out that the ephemeral nature of offline commentary is a big feature. If I say something offhand in a bar I don't have to curate that statement forever, going back every few months to add some editorial comment about how my opinion has changed. It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard work - which it is - but that history is a terrible burden for the living. You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you. It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that it biodegrades. Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jherdman 16y ago
How is this a problem with the web any more than anything? As soon as a thought leaves your mind and is engraved on some sort of medium (be it someone's memory, paper, or a webpage) it's out there for good. Publishing thoughts on web, like print, demands rigour from the author and the reader. Read actively, write like you have an audience, and be skeptical.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  As soon as a thought leaves your mind... it's out there for good. This is another mindset endemic to engineers like myself: First-order thinking. The notion that, because a bit in a piece of flash RAM, a memory in someone's brain, and an etching on the wall of a thousand-year-old church are all the same to first order -- "persistent" storage of information -- they can therefore safely be treated as the same thing. The second-order differences are pretty important. To pick just one particular example: Human memory is not just an incredibly fallable medium (you remember events that never happened, and your memory of events that did happen gets distorted over time and is situational, dependent on your current mood) but it is inevitably filtered through the personality of the rememberer. The only way to learn what a World War II veteran remembers about the war is to listen to what the veteran tells you. If the veteran happens to have been a personal friend of General Patton, they will tell you certain things about Patton. If the veteran was a sworn enemy of Patton, they will tell you other things about Patton. If you strive to prevent them from doing this consciously, they will do so unconsciously. Such is the nature of human memory and communication. A photograph of Patton, or a written memoir, is an entirely different beast. And, similarly, there is a big qualitative difference between a third-hand account of a conversation in a bar, an entry in a handwritten diary that is stored in your basement someplace, and a popular web page that has been downloaded a thousand times and is available on Bittorrent in case the original is taken down.
dkarl 16y ago
Web publishers take one kind of preservation seriously: many don't put dates on anything, hoping that readers will mistake it for fresh content.
jacquesm 16y ago
I love the 'recent results' options in search engines for that reason.

briancarper 16y ago

My opinion today is largely the same, yes. I love Clojure and in my spare time I use it for everything. If I tried to do a web app in Common Lisp again, I'd probably have an easier time of it today than in 2008, because I know a bit more. But I couldn't justify using either for a project for work. I generally choose Ruby instead nowadays. In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it. We have seemingly constant threads on HN saying "I can't hire a good programmer!" What are the chances of my non-programmer boss hiring a good Lisp programmer? At the small non-profit at which I work? Good freaking luck. I'm still using some PHP scripts at work today, and I still cringe to see the code, and I whine a little (to myself) whenever I have to edit it, and my boss still loves the end result, and it's done its job well for 2 years. What else matters? I believe in "Worse is Better" in this case. I do sneakily use Clojure at work for small data-munging tasks. But not for code anyone else ever needs to see. (I do also wonder why this blog post from 2008 made it to HN.)

sedachv 16y ago
"In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it." How do you think these Ruby libraries got written?
- cageface 16y ago
  How do you think these Ruby libraries got written? This is the crucial point. Take it a step further and ask yourself why? There are 10x as many potential library writers for Ruby/Python etc because it's 10x easier to get up to speed in those languages. If you want to put Clojure in the spotlight don't use it to build redundant, half-assed solutions to problems that are already solved. Use it to solve a new problem. Companies like Runa and BackType and Flightcaster are setting the right example here.
  - sedachv 16y ago