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Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- onefortwo 16y agoThis post is not about Yegge. It's a little comparison of Common Lisp and Scheme (Plt Racket). I think a post with such a bad title should not be read no matter its content but YMMV. This is all it contains about Steve Yegge: The quote from Yegge goes something like "Most newcomers independently come to the same conclusion; Scheme is the better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work." Bottom line, I remember disagreeing a long time ago, but I've uh... independently come to the same conclusion.
- bad_user 16y agoI think it also tries to copy Yegge's writing style :)
- Inaimathi 16y agoA while ago I noticed that I was suddenly doing more coding in SBCL than PLT Scheme. When I thought about it, I realized that Steve Yegge said the same thing a long time ago and I remember reacting with dismissal. The post wasn't about Yegge, it was about the idea (which I've heard elsewhere too, he just happened to be the one I remembered at the time) that Scheme is the "better language" while being paradoxically less "useful" than Common Lisp. In defense of the lame title, I tend to write in order to get things out of my head. Had I known that someone would post that article on Reddit and Hacker News, leading to Jay McCarthy dropping by and asking what, specifically, was wrong with his server, I might have proofread it more than 0 times before posting it anywhere.
- felideon 16y agoIt also always returns its result, and doesn't have the option of printing to standard-out (you have to use printf for that) (format t "hello world") From PCL: "T is shorthand for the stream STANDARD-OUTPUT, while NIL causes FORMAT to generate its output to a string, which it then returns."
- _delirium 16y agoHe was complaining that the format in Scheme (and in PLT Racket) doesn't have that CL feature.
- Inaimathi 16y agoThat's exactly what I meant. The CL version has options, the Scheme version just takes a format string (which has fewer possible directives than its CL counterpart), which makes it less flexible and slightly more verbose. To be fair, it's not exactly a straightforward paragraph, and I was talking about two different functions both named "format", so I can see how it might have been confusing.
- thomas11 16y agoWhether Common Lisp or Racket comes out in front in a comparison, it always strikes me as amazing what the Racket people get done given their manpower. I don't know how large the team exactly is, and how many external contributors they have. But looking at their site, they have everything from a modern Scheme with libraries, a web server, modern packaging, experimental sub-languages, a module contract system, and so on. And that's besides doing their academic work.
- SwellJoe 16y agoWhen did Yegge die?
- presidentender 16y agoHe got married; much later, he stopped blogging.
- etal 16y agoI'm deeply curious where Clojure would fall in this comparison. Is Compojure as suave as Hunchentoot? Is string formatting just as flexible? In practice, is it a pain to have to fail over to Java library documentation when Clojure doesn't suffice, versus having plentiful but scattered docs for a single language?
- jpr 16y agoI almost can't believe the #3, restarting a webserver for minor changes? That reeks of static, batch-language oriented solution. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with static batch-languages, but I wouldn't have thought Scheme is one.
- Inaimathi 16y agoThe other points about the web server (which Jay ended up focusing on more) are really side issues; my biggest gripe was that lack of iteration during the development phase. If I could change code on the fly, I'd be a happy camper.