5 ms·
Half-seriously—but could it actually be true? Because by using a high level language most of the time, you will miss the practice it takes to effortlessly progr
by YouAreGreat 9y ago
Half-seriously—but could it actually be true? Because by using a high level language most of the time, you will miss the practice it takes to effortlessly program manually what these languages automate.
Between "GC, full numeric tower, CLOS, incremental development" and especially the ease of metaprogramming in Lisp, you may eventually lose the ability to perform the very programming tasks you have automated away for yourself, whenever you lose access to your own macros.
The true Curse of Lisp would be that Lispers are constantly de-skilling themselves.
- wglb 9y agoHaving written a significant number of lines of assembler early in my career, I am happy to delegate the task of register allocation (an NP-complete problem) to a compiler. I don't miss that manual task, and don't think the rest of my career suffers for that. I also don't particularly miss worrying about malloc/free in my programs, nor having to write multi-precision floating point arithmetic routines.
- sedachv 9y agoThe number of Common Lisp programmers who are also ace system and assembly programmers (people like Luke Gorrie, Paul Khuong) disproves this hypothesis.
- flavio81 9y ago>The true Curse of Lisp would be that Lispers are constantly de-skilling themselves. Bollocks. You'd be surprised by seeing how many Lispers actually have great knowledge of low-level. In fact it's almost a "fashion" in the Lisp world.