21 ms·

The Programming Language Conundrum

• omaranto 8y ago
  Even if there is a scaling limit, you can still use SmallTalk or a Lisp for small projects (and the scope of small projects in those languages is larger than that of, say, small Java projects) and benefit. I imagine plenty of unglamorous software projects are small enough in scope. I am a mathematician, not a programmer, but even I have a Lisp story like this. I'm working with a computer science professor at my university who has in the past worked as a programmer both for private companies and for our government. We're studying some combinatorial game played on graphs and wanted experimental data of which player has a winning strategy on thousands of small graphs. To feel more certain of the computer results we decided to each write our own implementation independently without looking at each other's code. He wrote his in C and I wrote mine in Common Lisp. You can imagine the punchline since it is similar to all of the Lisp stories out there: my program is about a tenth of the number of lines of code, took much less time to write and runs about twice as fast!
  • dukoid 8y ago
    How would you know the projects stay small? Also, if you have to work on small and large projects, and one tool works for both, getting proficient in both tools might just not add enough benefit...
    • omaranto 8y ago
      I certainly have no idea how to predict if a programming project will stay small, but maybe people who do that kind of thing for a living have some idea? Also, I'm skeptical about this scaling limit business, but if it's true, call the first program a prototype or proof of concept and then rewrite in a "scalable" language when necessary. "Plan to throw one away, you will anyway."
    • yogthos 8y ago
      Any large project can be broken down into a set of small projects.
• timomax 8y ago
  Odd languages attract above average programmers, if nothing else than because they are engaged. Small teams are more productive than large teams, because there are almost no communication problems. I wonder how much is due to this?
  • geophile 8y ago
    I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language.
    • maxcut 8y ago
      > I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language. A good example to strengthen this argument is Petr Mitrichev who has won numerous competitive programming competitions and his language of choice is... Pascal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Mitrichev https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Mitrichev
      • adgasf 8y ago
        > It’s the people, not the language. Then why is it that so many good developers who have learned these more esoteric languages cannot stand going back to Java etc?
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
        • geophile 8y ago
          Because those esoteric languages are better. The comment I responded to points out that TFA makes the unreasonable assumption that the Java programmers and the Smalltalk programmers are equally talented. And that perhaps what is going on is that the people attracted to explore beyond Java are more curious and perhaps more interested in their craft. If that is the case, then I predict these people will be better in Java, even if it isn't their first choice.
• mpweiher 8y ago
  > 1. Create a language to solve your problem; > 2. Solve your problem. But don't we do this in every language, at least if we're doing a good job? I remember the final "exam" of my high school CS class. It was mostly an in-class programming exercise in Pascal. I was the only one to finish in less than the allotted time. The first one to finish after me did so after the second extension period. I have to admit while I was obviously inordinately pleased with myself, I was also baffled, because the other people in the class were certainly just as smart as I was. So what was the difference? The problem we were given was to draw a bunch of boxes with character graphics with contents and some overlap. Not really hard. Everybody else coded up each box individually with straight code. One after the other. Each time having the handle all the edge cases (literally). I was the only one who first created a procedure (or set of procedures) for box drawing, and then used those procedures to draw the boxes. And yes, that is very much a simple "language" for solving the problem. Of course the language set some pretty tight limits on how your "language" could look, which is a bane for expression and a boon for understanding. So I did "define the language, solve the problem in that language". In Pascal. Classic bottom-up programming. So I dispute that there is a fundamental difference, though there definitely is a significant difference in degree. The difference with high-power languages is that they allow us to apply this much more broadly, whereas with other languages you often run into technical limitations that prevent you from really defining the right language. With there not being a fundamental difference, I also don't buy that we have a fundamental, unbridgeable divide/chasm/whatever, with these high-power languages with their problems on one side and the "blub" languages with their other problems on the other. Rather, let's explore that regions of the language space and see if we can't narrow the gap.
  • gameswithgo 8y ago
    metaprogramming allows more compression of your code than functions alone, sometimes by huge factors
    • mpweiher 8y ago
      Yep. I named my company ‘metaobject’ after The Art of Metaobject Protocol. 20 years ago. Metaprogramming is powerful. Can we make it more practical so we can reduce or eliminate the chasm Cees writes about?
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "(and do not forget: they are that powerful)" Are they? Because small teams are naturally much more productive, I thought that was going to be the 'aha' of the article.
  • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Yeah, I was expecting something along the lines of the old saw "what a team of two programmers can do in two weeks, a team of six programmers can do in three months".
• BuckRogers 8y ago
  I enjoyed the build up throughout the article to his conclusion. While I can't prove him wrong, a lot of very smart people came up with languages like Java and C# to solve these problems (ramp up, maintainability, retention, and more) as efficiently as possible. While I salute the author in his quest to be proven wrong, objectively, everything is a trade-off. I don't believe in better.
• KirinDave 8y ago
  The proposition that "custom development tooling doesn't scale" is very much news to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. All of them have custom programmable configuration stacks, meta languages for their environments, and custom application harness instructions. So why don't those count as counterexamples? It seems like a just-so story.
  • mwcampbell 8y ago
    Those companies are so high-profile, with so many people wanting to work for them, that they can do what they want, and the new hires will keep coming. But in an obscure company, especially one that's not very well funded, it may make sense to use a blub language so the company can attract programmers that it can afford. Of course, using a less powerful language will limit the productivity of those programmers. But having two or three moderately productive programmers is probably better than being dependent on one bipolar [1] programmer. [1]: http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html
    • Gene_Parmesan 8y ago
      > of doing things at the last minute but still doing pretty well at them. > Another feature about this guy is his low threshold of boredom. He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its properly finished. > But brilliance is not enough. You need application too, because the material is harder at university. So pretty soon our man is getting B+, then Bs and then Cs for his assignments. He experiences alternating feelings of failure cutting through his usual self assurance. He can still stay up to 5.00AM and hand in his assignment before the 9.00AM deadline, but what he hands in is not so great. That linked article is literally just describing undiagnosed ADHD, which yes, can affect otherwise successful students (of which I was one). Usually it's a form of Primarily Inattentive ADHD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder_predominantly_inattentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit... [1], which doesn't present as hyperactivity but instead as inner restlessness. Teenagers with this variety of ADHD go undiagnosed at significantly higher rates than Hyperactive ADHD. Those with the hyperactive variety are easily noticed due to their tendencies to run around rooms, act out, jump out of their seats at inappropriate times, and so on. But the Inattentive kids suffer due to the existence of just this very stereotype -- the smart but bored kid. For some reason, with ADHD-H we're able to say, "This kid isn't following the norms in school because of a cognitive deficit," but when it comes to ADHD-PI people think "This kid isn't following the norms in school because he's just so over it, man." Meanwhile, these kids are often tortured by their inability to work as hard and as consistently as they want to. Everyone in my life just assumed for me that I was "so smart that I was just bored in school, no challenge!", but meanwhile I was depressed from about the age of 10 by my complete inability to succeed in school to the extent I wanted to. I loved school, and was depressed by my inability to pay attention and work harder. These students were able to succeed in high school because the material is mostly accessible via some amount of common sense. I was able to ace a lot of objective (multiple choice, etc.) exams through nothing more than logical deduction. But in college, assignments require more discipline over time -- writing long research papers, motivating yourself to work on something over weeks -- which is when the failures start appearing more and more frequently. My GPA went from 4.0 in middle school to 3.7 in high school to 3.2 in college. 3.2 sounds fine to some, but it was the most depressed I've ever been because I felt my life's potential slipping through my fingers. So rather than having professors write condescending articles over our "bipolar personality" I'd much prefer if we, as a society, could work to truly understand the challenges that these kids face; to look beyond the stereotypes and actually care about their wellbeing. [1] I used to think ADHD was made up. Why? Because I couldn't understand what was different about kids with an ADHD diagnosis. I would read lists of ADHD symptoms and think, "But that's just normal life! I experience that stuff all day every day, and I don't have ADHD!" It took me until the age of 28, and until my wife was there to help me shake the cobwebs off of my denial, before I was able to have the realization that strongly relating with the ADHD symptoms meant that I had the disorder, not that ADHD was "just normal life."
• dahart 8y ago
  > A lot has been written about "hyperproductive teams". ... there’s one thing in common between all the stories I’ve heard and the successes experienced first hand: small teams Personally, I'd go one step further. It's small teams that were together from the start. Going through the initial setup of a project makes all the difference. When people come later, they lack the intuition that comes with being around when all the structural decisions were made. Early people make tradeoffs and bake good and bad practices into the pipeline, later people are told not to touch certain things because it's more complicated than it looks or will break something else that doesn't seem explicitly connected. I've been on both sides of this fence. Having started a company and sold it - my partner and I were hyper productive, but while the small team that inherited the code is extremely capable, it took years longer to feel comfortable making big changes than it took to write. Joining other people's projects and large codebases, on the other hand, has always taken a long time for me to be productive in. Typically it takes a year at a new company before I'm moderately useful. Personally I don't think this has a ton to do with programming languages, even though I feel much more productive in python and javascript than C++ myself, even though I've been using C++ longer. I still suspect familiarity with the early decisions is a greater factor in productivity than language.
  • brightball 8y ago
    Part of that is the difference from having a system with paying customers vs a new system still trying to gain them. Risk for changes increases with success and for devs who don’t own the company they can’t make hard calls as easily.
    • dahart 8y ago
      I would have to agree with this wholeheartedly, thanks for adding it. Yes, risk tolerance drops over time as a business solidifies, and hyper productivity is partly a function of high tolerance for risk. Risk tolerance goes down at the same time that sales and technical debt and complexity and team size all go up, so I think losing the feeling of hyper productivity over time the more successful a company is, is both natural and inevitable.
  • 8y ago
• mises 8y ago
  Maybe this is part of the benefit of the whole micro-service trend? I've largely dismissed the idea until now as impractical in many cases, but this seems like a case where a team of between three and six developers could work in something like lisp (that may not scale well), expose an api, and communicate with other parts. It seems like we really need cross-language oop for this reason. MS COM might be an example. I was reading something I clicked on yesterday when doing some reading about reference counting, and someone commented that things like MS Office (COM based) needed such things: something could be initialized in one language, passed to another, and deinitialized in a third.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    This could make an interesting case for a "hybrid" Clojure/Java codebase. Write focused modules in Clojure, exposing strong-typed APIs that are then stitched together in Java.
  • danielparks 8y ago
    > Hmm, maybe this is part of the benefit of the whole micro-service trend? I think micro-services can actually make this worse. The issue is that the early coders write macros and other tooling that makes it harder for future coders to understand. In other words, they develop their own service-specific language. With one big service, you would expect a somewhat consistent set of practices. So, one language for the entire service. With micro-services you can have a different language for each service. Worse, each language might be only slightly different. If you end up with a consistent language across all of your micro-services, then you’re back to the original problem. (I’ve experienced this effect first-hand. If I’m not disciplined I’ll do a bunch of meta programming that makes me _way_ more productive, but makes it much harder for another programmer to understand.)
• herodotus 8y ago
  > Create a language to solve your problem; > Solve your problem. When I worked on a complex framework in a small team, we used Objective-C. In the early days of the project, we created some powerful utility methods like map and reduce which we used extensively in the early stages. These methods let us do things like traverse complex structures very compactly. Way better than the more plodding while-loop (perhaps with a stack) way of doing it. But, I found myself moving away from these later in the project in favour of more verbose code because it took me too long to understand the map/reduce code if I needed to revisit it. The longer code was, um, longer, but it was much easier to understand what I (or my colleagues) had done when I came back to this code. In my view, a bunch of very smart programmers can indeed be "hyperproductive" using a language like Smalltalk, but this hyper-productivity may not survive the longer term life of the project.
  • akvadrako 8y ago
    How is map difficult to understand? It’s the same semantics as a for loop with input and output lists, but less boilerplate.
    • Insanity 8y ago
      The parent did say they rolled their own map/reduce. It might not have been exactly as one would expect it to work in that case. But yeah, map/reduce are so common nowadays that I think most people would not have a problem with them anymore. Even Java is doing them now :) OTOH, if you've never encountered them because you come from languages that did not have them, they might be confusing at first. Some of my colleagues did have trouble getting used to map/reduce when Java8 came around.
    • koala_man 8y ago
      >It’s the same semantics as a for loop with input and output lists Arguably it's even easier because you you generally know you won't have inter-item dependencies.
    • auggierose 8y ago
      I would say it is the difference between first-order and higher-order. While loops are first-order, thus easier to understand, while map is higher-order, thus more difficult to understand.
• ken 8y ago
  I'm skeptical for the simple reason that this post never calls out any specific feature of Lisp or Smalltalk which could cause this problem, and other languages which apparently don't suffer from these problems have most of the same features. It's almost as if unpopularity is the root cause. Guy Steele famously said that with Java they "managed to drag a lot of [C++ programmers] about halfway to Lisp". I don't hear many complaints about Java being too 'organic' or difficult to document or that it only works on 2-pizza teams. If you think that sufficiently powerful languages only work on small teams of dedicated people, why draw the line at Lisp/Smalltalk? Why aren't the Ada people going crazy about how loose and dynamic Java is, much less Python and Ruby -- all of which apparently "breeze through the 100, 200, 500 developer marks without much trouble"? I remember reading about how Codd's relational databases struggled with acceptance because it was believed at the time that 'tables' were too complex for the average programmer, yet today that idea is laughable. People tend to rise to the level of expectation.
  • dasyatidprime 8y ago
    > It's almost as if unpopularity is the root cause. It kind of is. What determines which things people are excited to learn? What determines which things people will feel safe doing? What determines which things get you in, and which get you sidelined? Creating knowledge that can be used in practice in a non-enclave environment, and creating common knowledge, overlap a lot. “Make this maintainable” = “Make this something people can adequately be assumed to know how to maintain” = “Don't do anything weird”—thus the focus on keeping code idiomatic. So it's not really about absolute power; it's about relative power. If you can establish a cultural boundary, and then set up a pipeline of enough people dealing with a higher-power language, it seems possible to make that work, but that's a social undertaking that easily falls apart to things like “people will call you elitist for separating yourself and doing anything that might imply the others are inferior” (this visibly happens to Lispers) and “your code gains more from talking to other code easily than it does from being powerful in itself, so you need a lot of knowledge surface area, where people who use your environment are widely distributed in what else they know”. Notably, though, enclaves of Lisp and OCaml do exist in industry where there's some amount of big projects that have a limited surface area and they can make use of the higher power. I've heard similarly for Haskell. And academia seems to practically be a supercluster for higher-power language use. I get the impression that one of the big ways Java and C#¹ are gradually steering the big ships into higher-power water is by having backing organizations who can introduce a new “fancy” feature, document it extensively, watch how the great masses of programmers in that language actually use it, push for them to learn it, and then wait before adding the next feature, so that the delta between highest and lowest power feels more socially safe; no one is ever far enough from the crowd to become a problem, but the rallying banner can still move it gradually. The slowness is widely detested among programmers who want to jump to the higher power level now and know that there isn't necessarily a technical reason not to, but it's a feature for social cohesion. It also provides a convenient binding for transmitting this information for teamwork purposes: “we're using Java 8” implies a whole set of things about expectations in a way that “we're using Common Lisp” by itself doesn't. ¹ Apparently I can't write the sharp sign here.
• fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  I’m not sure I buy this: I recently had to write a bit of ruby (an omniauth strategy for my company’s OAuth2 server) and the code I encountered there (as well as in the various rails projects I’ve worked on) may as well have been written in macro-heavy lisp: in fact, lisp or smalltalk would be preferable because they would have good source navigation tools for the macros, such as a stepping macro-expander.
  • goatlover 8y ago
    Ruby supports a lot of metaprogramming, and some libraries and frameworks take advantage of that. It's not the best counter example to Lisp/Smalltalk.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
      My point is that a fairly popular platform that large teams use has nearly as much metaprogramming in its widely used libraries as any Lisp or Smalltalk codebase I’ve seen. So, I don’t think that the tendency of Lisp programs to evolve DSLs is incompatible with large teams.
• carapace 8y ago
  > It’s very organic, very hard to document, and thus it becomes very hard to absorb new brains into the system. I think they way out is [something like] Alan Kay's "active documents". If you really need large teams (rather than communicating constellations of small teams, say) then your software has to be structured to be communicable. (Beyond Knuth's "literate programming" even, I think.)
• zvrba 8y ago
  I don't buy that the "privilege" of > 1. Create a language to solve your problem; > 2. Solve your problem. belongs mainly to Lisp and Smalltalk. Each time you define a method or a class (C#, Java, C++), you're extending and defining your "language". I'm the leader of a 2.5-developer startup, we use C++, Java and C# for different purposes, and I have not once thought "shit, we'd be so much more productive if we used XXX instead of C# or Java" (C++ being the exception). Because the real problems are around the business domain. Understanding customer needs, wrapping our heads around Azure AD, etc, etc, etc. The programming language has ZILCH to do with our challenges and I do not feel hampered by PL during refactoring either -- thanks to static types. I have some regrets, and these go against frameworks we decided to use (EFCore, i.e., ORM, being the biggest regret of mine). Programming language? Almost not a factor. I'm happy with all of the 3 we use, though I'm least productive in C++ due to the amount of ceremony needed -- header/implementation files, linkage, fixing preprocessor mess by variations of PIMPL (looking at you windows.h), slow compilation, etc, etc, etc. If anything is indispensable for our productivity, it's a good ide and becoming comfortable with its capabilities.
  • minsight 8y ago
    When you have a good language, you don't need a good IDE.
    • andrewflnr 8y ago
      Alternatively, when you have a good IDE, you don't need a good language, freeing you to optimize other concerns like ecosystem. Not defending crappy languages, just saying that argument cuts both ways.
    • Koshkin 8y ago
      This is like saying that if you have sharp nails you do not need a hammer. (IDEs can be, and are, extremely helpful; even simple text editors like nano or SciTE try to include some of the features normally found in an IDE.)
    • zvrba 8y ago
      When you have good memory, you don't need to google anything twice.
• marcosdumay 8y ago
  I am yet to see a team of 100 successfully working on the same problem. I've seen large codebases that solve lots of different problems with 100's of people working on it at the same time, but this isn't the same thing. My point is, if you are on the second situation, you can very likely split your people into different teams, facing different trade-offs and with a formal (but not static) interface between their code. So if you can get a 10 people team with the productivity of a 100 people team, but unable to scale further, well, you will face the same problem on the 100 people team, and can apply the same kind of solution to both. The only difference is that you are saving 90 people.
• adgasf 8y ago
  Are teams using these languages small because the language doesn't scale well or because you don't actually need more developers?
• jcelerier 8y ago
  > So why aren’t we all using either of these two languages? because $bigcorp's dreams with languages such as Java was not to be incredibly productive, but to be able to fire a whole team, hire replacements, and have them be more-or-less productive on day 1. Can't do that if every project lives in its own DSL.
  • ken 8y ago
    Even in a lower-level language, is it possible to be productive on day 1? Instead of learning an explicit DSL, you're learning an implicit one spread across 10 or 100 times as much code. Imagine if regexes didn't exist, and you showed up at a new company and they had hundreds of lines of Java for every little string matching function. Would anyone find that more productive? Even if regexes were never used outside of that one project, I think they'd be a huge win. Especially at a bigco. My experience is you spend a while just getting all your accounts set up. Half the time, I haven't even known the programming language they used, so I spend weeks/months ramping up on that, even though it's not domain-specific. Spending a couple days learning a new DSL is just rounding error.
    • jcelerier 8y ago
      I'm not saying that this idea is grounded in reality :)
  • sulam 8y ago
    This is both really wrong factually and really cynical to a degree that is also wrong. This may be _some_ people's dreams, but the reality is that this is not the foundation story of Java, at all. Java's popularity had more to do with its portability (you could write your code on your Windoze box and then deploy it to SunOS or Linux with a reasonable expectation of it working just fine) and its safety (it was a marked improvement over C) than on the dream that it would be the language that allowed for offshoring your team. In fact, amusingly, I'd argue Golang is more explicitly designed to be able to bring new developers up to speed rapidly and not requiring them to be language experts to be productive. This has direct impact with respect to being able to hire developers, possibly en masse. And hey, whaddaya know, it was dreamed up by a $bigcorp way bigger than Sun was back in the day. The reality tho is that $bigcorp just wants to be able to write more code, not replace the coders they already have.
• eruci 8y ago
  There is more than one way to do it. Or, only one: Perl.
• yogthos 8y ago
  I have the exact opposite experience going from working primarily with Java to Clojure. I worked with the former for nearly a decade, and I haven't contributed to a single library or project I used in that time. Every time I'd see a bug or a feature I'd like to add, I'd check the source see thousands of classes each with its own semantics and behaviors, and give up. The amount of effort needed to familiarize yourself with a non-trivial Java codebase is herculean. Meanwhile, I've contributed to many Clojure libraries, and lots of people contributed to the ones I maintain. I can open a Clojure project and figure out what's going on much easier than with a Java one. The code tends to be much more direct. It's primarily written using pure functions that you can reason about independently. It's focused on the data, so I don't have to learn hidden behaviors. And I have a live environment with the REPL where I can run the code and see what it does immediately. My team has been working with Clojure for nearly a decade now. We have many applications in production that have been developed and maintained for many years. We've hired many new devs during that time, and we've never had problems onboarding. A language being expressive and flexible does not preclude it from scaling to large projects. And when the language is not expressive, you end up with huge amounts of incidental code because you're forced to map your problem domain to the language as opposed to the other way around. I think that community practices for using the language are far more important. Clojure community started discouraging heavy use of macros early on, and a small set of common patterns tends to be used to solve problems, and codebases across projects tend to have a similar style to them.
• andyidsinga 8y ago
  > These languages are very powerful, but they don’t scale. The problem, it seems to me is that software developers often think: "what programming language do we really like && can continue to use for $long_time over $scaling_of_business". When this is the case, business management expectation problems emerge regarding costs, maintenance and timing when the business scales by 10 or 100x. Early phase teams are lambasted for making poor decisions - and "adult supervision" ( i hate that term ) is hired to "fix things". Thing is, the early "poor decisions" may not have been poor decisions at all relative to the business needs. However, since costs and retooling issues weren't discussed and planned for - the early team look like a bunch of fools/amateurs. As software developers, we need to understand and communicate that the tools can we use to accomplish the needs for the business at one stage are different than those of a later high-scale stage. its OK, completely natural, and a requirement if we want to keep our jobs and grow with the business. analogy: If a specialty carpenter is designing and building high end furniture with a set of well made brand-name niche tools and techniques they wouldn't expect that those same tools would be used if sales take off and 10x or 100x the number of units need to be produced. It would be understood that retooling would be required, people with expertise in those tools be hire and that there would be new costs involved. Also, the carpenter who starts the business with small scale tools isn't lambasted for being an idiot for picking those tools in the early phases. It would be quite odd to suggest that that person have picked tools and hired people for 100x production when they were selling single digit units a year.
  • duado 8y ago
    The question is what the intention was. A carpenter doing models for IKEA would be expected to design for million-unit volumes from the start.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • andyidsinga 8y ago
      different problems here - if the production and scale are already well known and understood - there are, arguably only design choices to be made that fit into the existing tooling. "the new chair model must fit into these production constraints" "the new software must be written to fit into this system - JVM based, web interface ..."
• 4thaccount 8y ago
  I think the small team aspect is far more important than anything else. With two developers in a startup, you can split up key components and have quick informal talks concerning design choices. In a real company, huge amounts of time are wasted on all-staff meetings, team meetings, 1:1 meetings, management fads, mandatory compliance trainings that come up quarterly and take hours, and the sheer human problem of coordinating that many people. Big companies have huge waste stemming from many different areas. For example, at a large company they have people in charge of requirements that have no understanding of the domain or how to write software. It's like the telephone game you get as a kid where the message completely changes by the time it gets around the circle. Of course you could have your devs do that job, but most companies simply aren't that logical. I bet Paul Graham and another competent developer could use a language that is not considered to be very productive (Ex: C++) and still swim circles past a large IBM team that is being held down by it's own weight.
  • mwcampbell 8y ago
    > mandatory compliance trainings that come up quarterly and take hours Compliance has a bad name because it's bureaucratic. But in software, compliance can cover important things like privacy, security, internationalization, and accessibility. Getting these things right is a moral imperative in many cases. For this reason, the rise of move-fast-and-break-things startups, with their developers unfettered by bureaucracy, worries me.
    • 4thaccount 8y ago
      I'll agree that there is likely some value (usually CYA for the company) and some real value too. However, those things still take up significant time that the two-person startup doesn't have to worry about and that is just one class of time wasters for big companies. It's always something: A big day-long network outage, firedrills, performance reviews, management shakeups, water cooler gossip, sending emails, reading emails, sudden surprise requests from executives, having to have IT install something as they took away admin rights, preparing for audits and disaster recovery...etc. I bet a startup could easily avoid 30% of the work which just comes with having 100-1000 people in an organization.
• gumby 8y ago
  That's a very good insight here on large/small teams. Although I typically hate discussions of "programming languages are like human languages" I think it's the key here. All the team members need to share and be comfortable in not just a spoken language, but the teams local jargon, and the programming language in use (including your team-specific conventions, which form a kind of jargon too). So teams in these esoteric languages (and I say this as a Lisp hacker myself) tend to be by definition small, have a lot of cultural overlap, and can be hyper-effective. And small teams can be hyper productive/effective because of the lack of coordination overhead and because it's easier to have a high 1st derivative from a small starting point (in other words: no large team can beat a small team in efficacy/person, but small teams can't do everything). That only answers half the problem; the other is: well if small team X can beat small team Y in significant part because of the choice of tools, why don't bigger teams use the same tools? There's no easy answer. One is power: Lisp and C++ have too many degrees of freedom so it's easier to get in to trouble with languages with fewer "guard rails". This was an explicit design criterion for Go BTW: new grads are coming here and screwing up, so let's make it hard for them to make the most common/dangerous mistakes. Second in the case of Lisp: it wasn't considered a deployment language as many of the things that made is powerful (e.g. GC, lambda, dispatch, dynamic polymorphism) were considered too expensive at a time when C and smaller machines were taking off. Now many of those features are considered mainstream in other languages, while the Lisp community itself therefore attracted people who were more power users. C++ had a driver (Windows) and an impetus (like Go's: C gets you into a lot of trouble) but even then people looked for easier / safer languages (e.g. Java, an explicit reaction to ++)
• DFXLuna 8y ago
  The idea is pretty simple: concise languages ( like python, smalltalk etc.) work well when you can get away with being concise. Verbose languages ( like the C family ) work well when you can't. It only takes a couple of tries writing a project that favors verbosity in a concise language before this becomes apparent.
  • nine_k 8y ago
    Languages like С allow you to control more (low-level) aspects of a program than languages like Ruby. Ruby is only concise because it handles tons of things for you, the way it sees fit. You can make C++ quite concise, or quite verbose, depending on the level of detail you can hide under layers of abstractions. It's much like the framework vs set of libraries: a framework allows you to write very little and produce a lot when all you're doing is wiring together existing pieces and write business logic code it the slots provided for that. Similarly Ruby allows you to write much lass than C if all you're doing is wiring together hashtables of hastables of hashtables, and rely on garbage collection.
  • dqpb 8y ago
    The point of this article was more about writing DSLs than just conciseness.
• overgard 8y ago
  I think what really makes those languages/teams productive is iteration time being low. Part of that is a natural consequence of small teams and lack of legacy code but certain languages definitely encourage it more than others. If you have fast iteration times you can really quickly figure out a system by experimenting, or work through bad ideas on the way to good ones. For whatever reason software developers always seem to undervalue fast iteration times, and the less productive languages always seem to make iterating quickly harder, whether it’s C++s ghastly compilation times and lack of an ABI making it hard to integrate libraries, or Java’s interdependent class based nature causing excessive mocking and/or lots of generally unrelated state being required to have a working object to test with. In contrast smalltalk lets you just highlight a chunk of code and run it, and the lack of separation between runtime and ide generally means you have enough of the system live for things to work. I think where smalltalk doesn’t scale is it can’t easily take advantage of things invented outside of it because it’s so integrated and practically its own OS
• dqpb 8y ago
  Sounds like language oriented programming: https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/Language_Oriented_Programming.pdf https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/La...
• pmattos 8y ago
  I agree with the OP. This has been called the Lisp Curse elsewhere. Over time, your codebase becomes so high-level, full of advanced, domain-centric abstractions that basically alienates everyone else from effectively working on the project. If you have a small, stable team that such issue might be relatively easy to overcome. But with bigger teams, with higher turnover, than it might totally cancel out any technical advantage gained from using such non-mainstream programming languages.
• kstenerud 8y ago
  "These languages are very powerful, but they don’t scale. So even when you get ten times the productivity, the mostly tribal complexity will not scale beyond your “pizza-sized team” and therefore you now have a hard upper limit on your total software development capacity." Ultimately, the problem boils down to the languages giving too much freedom. More conventional languages like Java can scale to a massive degree because they standardize so many things, which means that you can now share components which amplify your work. Lisp et al are cool toys and small team tools, but you're not going to see any large scale db libraries and parsers and concurrency libraries and web servers and cachers and HA systems that can interoperate with each other without a ton of shoehorning. When every foreign chunk of code requires a ton of ramp up time just to figure out what it's doing and how you could even integrate it, or requires changing your IDE and workflow in ways incompatible with what you have already, you lose more than you gain. Worse is better. Worse gives you interoperable, reusable, amplifiable components, in a common framework everyone understands.
  • WalterBright 8y ago
    > the languages giving too much freedom This is why the D programming language doesn't have macros, neither text nor AST. It's been a controversial decision, and I've had trouble convincing people of the reasons why. Others explain it as "Walter doesn't like macros." The reason is that macros enable one to invent one's own language withing the language, and that language is incomprehensible to others. It happens with every language that supports macros and macro-like constructs. (It happens with C++ "expression templates" and operator overloading.) People swear up and down that they'd never use macros that way, they'd use them responsibly, and the incomprehensible mess they create is indeed responsible. For a hilarious example, an engineer I know recounted a story at Big Corp where there was an aged piece of software written in assembler. The programmer for it had long since moved on. The code had some problems and needed updating. Unfortunately, the programmer had invented his own language using the macro system, and nobody wanted to touch it. My engineer friend said he could do it, and had the code fixed in a couple hours. Amazed, the manager asked how he'd figured out those macros. He replied "I didn't. I assembled the code, ran it through a disassembler, converted that back to source code, then fixed it."
• PaulAJ 8y ago
  The poster makes a point about conservatism in large companies, but doesn't explore this further. Its actually a more complicated matter than just technical ignorance in managers. The real problem is that programming languages are seen as a tactical matter for project managers ("just use the best one for the job"), whereas they should be considered strategic. * At the start of a project the PM is given a budget and a timescale which were probably driven by the question "whats the earliest you can't prove you won't be done by?" There will be no slack for developers to spend 6 months coming up to speed on a new programming language and paradigm. * Nor can the PM afford the career risk of trying something new. If you do it the standard way and it doesn't work, the decision to do it the standard way was obviously not responsible and the search for blame can be pushed elsewhere. But if you pick something novel and it doesn't work, the blame for any failure will always focus on the novel element. So there is a strong institutional pressure to keep doing things the same way to avoid the blame for failure. * Once a piece of software is finished it has to be maintained. Most software expenditure actually goes on this phase. If you use a new programming language then you are going to have to keep a bunch of programmers around who speak that language just for that project, even if there are no changes needed this year. That is expensive, so this is another disincentive for trying a new language. * Every technical manager has seen enthusiastic young programmers bearing some new silver bullet (see Fred Brooks) which, the youngster says, will solve all the problems at a stroke. After you have seen half a dozen of these they all start to look the same. There is also concern about "CV engineering": getting the company to take on the risk and cost of training employees in trendy technologies which won't provide real benefit but which will make those employees more likely to find a higher paid job somewhere else. If programming languages were considered as a strategic matter then a large company could make a decision to invest in tooling, training and increased project risk in order to adopt a new language which would make them more productive in the long term. But until then change will be forced on the industry by small companies who beat the averages.
• dustingetz 8y ago
  you’re given a $10M budget to solve a problem so you write it in Lisp and keep all the money. Break this absurdity in any number of ways and see. Tech, business, people etc.
• karmakaze 8y ago
  The real problem is that there's a missing step: 1. Create a language to solve your problem 2. Solve your problem 3. Document the language Presuming that the original creators made a reasonable language for the problem at hand, who wouldn't want to use a powerful, well designed language with good fitness of purpose? Now imagine that you were brought onto a team using a widespread (not homegrown) language you didn't know that was used for the company's main application, but you have no access to documentation.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    I find that I almost never read documentation in languages like Common Lisp and Clojure for two reasons: 1) documentation is often unmaintained and reflects the state of the library at some point in time, but not the current API. But... 2) even when there is good documentation, it’s often easier to just take a code example and then use the excellent jump to definition and other tooling to understand how the example works than it is to read the definition: in part, because there’s always a repl available in these languages and it’s much easier and quicker to run mini-experiments on the language at the repl than it is to read the documentation and translate it to code.
    • reikonomusha 8y ago
      I think Lisp’s “the source is the documentation” (with comments and doc strings) is a huge boon. I usually figure out how something works faster and more accurately than, say Ctrl+F’ing some Python Sphinx documentation.
      • flavio81 8y ago
        >I think Lisp’s “the source is the documentation” (with comments and doc strings) is a huge boon. True. At first i thought "Damn, there is little documentation on those Lisp libraries", but as the months passed, I understood that often code was very readable, and the fact that documentation strings are integral to the language is also a good thing.
    • karmakaze 8y ago
• amelius 8y ago
  > Create a language to solve your problem; > Solve your problem. But a typical problem consists of multiple sub-problems. Are you going to create a new language for each of them?
• perlgeek 8y ago
  > I can recite many of such stories; of people keeping up with their ten person team by coding whatever the team did during the day in 2-3 hours at night using Squeak Smalltalk; about an old Lisp hacker working in a research setup with mostly Java colleagues and always estimating to need 10% of the time (and then actually making the estimate). So why aren’t we all using either of these two languages? Maybe it isn't about the language, primarily, but about the team? Maybe those super productive teams would have been successful with any language that gave them enough freedom? That would also explain why you can't switch your 20 Java developers to Smalltalk, and have them perform miracles of software engineering.
• upofadown 8y ago
  The root issue is extensibility. The same sort of arguments come up with the simplest extensible language: Forth. There are whole categories of embedded applications where Forth can cut the development time down to a fraction of what it would take to do it in C. Once that programmer leaves it takes a long time for someone else to come up to speed to do the sort of simple modifications that such applications tend to require. ... and where do you get a programmer that can do anything effective with an extensible language anyway? Such people tend to be very good programmers in general and are rare and expensive.
• cryptonector 8y ago
  I don't think the issue is that the language weaves with the mind (or the reverse). Instead I think there's several issues at play, at least these, and probably others: a) mindshare, b) dynamic type systems suck. (b) alone may seem insufficient, since TFA mentions Python as a language that scales, but I've never seen large Python systems -- lots of small Python programs and libraries, yes, but monolythic multi-mloc Python applications? no. When you get to that size, dynamic typing issues become time sinks. As to mindshare, if the number of developers who know Lisp is small, you're not going to get a lot of them. Mind you, you should be able to train them -- once you speak N>3 programming languages, getting to N+1 is not that difficult. But it's a lot easier to hire C++/Java/whatever programmers. This is a mindshare effect. Also, if 1.5 FTEs allows you to build a successful company, then to scale development to 100 FTEs you have to rewrite, well, that's still a success. Many would like to have that problem. And nowadays we're getting good at incremental rewrites as an industry -- witness the Rust effort. I think the future lies with Rust. Rust is a very high-level programming language, but it still lets you get down to the same low level as C. If you sold Rust as a Haskell w/ linear types, no/minimal monads, no I/O monad, and a C-ish syntax -basically, what it is-, I think TFA might run away saying "oh no, another Smalltalk that won't scale". At the very least I'd like to think and hear a lot more about the issue -- whether and why some programming languages do or do not scale teams -- before accepting TFA's conclusion.
• galaxyLogic 8y ago
  One downside of Lisp and Smalltalk for large projects may be that there is no official mechanism for declaring types and interfaces. Even if you can adopt your own conventions for implying the types they are just your convention and other programmers might have difficulty grokking and trusting them. Hyper-productive languages may be hyper-productive just because they use dynamic typing and static types may be better for creating a large piece of software by many programmers evolving over years hopefully decades.
  • lispm 8y ago
    Ever heard of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System? It has 'classes', 'generic functions' with 'methods' which support multiple dispatch over classes, etc. It was defined in the late 80s and integrating it into Common Lisp made it the first standardized OO language. (defclass person () ((name :type string) (age :type (integer 0 150)) (exployed-by :type company))) (defmethod rename-person ((p person) (old-name string) (new-name string)) ...) (rename-person some-person "Jim" "James")
    • galaxyLogic 8y ago
      I've heard of it but not used. Being able to say: "(name :type string)" looks great. Does it mean the system gives me an error if a method is called with a number where a string was declared to be the argument type?
      • lispm 8y ago
        At runtime every CLOS implementation will do that. Note that it allows for more than one parameter to be specialized. In the example FOO is using multiple dispatch with two parameters P and S. When we call FOO with arguments for which no method exists we get: CL-USER 22 > (defclass person () ((name :type string) (age :type (integer 0 150)) (exployed-by :type company))) #<STANDARD-CLASS PERSON 4210214F63> CL-USER 23 > (defmethod foo ((p person) (s string)) (list p s)) #<STANDARD-METHOD FOO NIL (PERSON STRING) 402025C653> CL-USER 24 > (foo (make-instance 'person) 3) Error: No applicable methods for #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION FOO 4060000B5C> with args (#<PERSON 402025F1DB> 3) 1 (continue) Call #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION FOO 4060000B5C> again 2 (abort) Return to top loop level 0. Type :b for backtrace or :c <option number> to proceed. Type :bug-form "<subject>" for a bug report template or :? for other options. CL-USER 25 : 1 >
• externalreality 8y ago
  > A lot has been written about "hyperproductive teams". ... there’s one thing in common between all the stories I’ve heard and the successes experienced first hand: small teams Funny because I don't think its small teams or a particular programming language that leads to great productivity. You don't have to look very far or far back to see teams, of various sizes, pulling off some amazing stuff with assembler and C. The key to productivity is a lot simpler, and independent of software development. Its a sense of responsibility, interest, and dedication. In a small team that is using small talk the responsibility might come from being on a small team with a lot of lifting to do, the interest might come from having fun using a language that you like (regardless of the language), and the dedication might come from the promise of getting in early on a promising venture - hence the small team. All of these things add up to hyper-production. If you can establish those three things, somehow, with a large team I don't see why hyper-production can't be achieved. Unfortunately modern project management for large teams seems to rely heavily on techniques that rob developers of all three qualities mentioned above in the name of so called "agile" and in pursuit of some fictitious software assembly line.
• fredsted 8y ago
  Could it be that these languages haven't evolved all of the tooling and ecosystems other languages have? You don't spend time setting up stuff. With web dev, you constantly spend time switching between various tools to just even build the damn thing/app. None of it is needed, per se - for years everybody made web sites without it - but we've all convinced each other that it's just what you do. Maybe Smalltalk doesn't have these conventions (yet)?
• zmmmmm 8y ago
  I think there's a really important aspect to this that the software industry needs to confront in order to mature. To some extent - not completely, but at least partially, power and unmaintainability are two sides of the same coin. That is, it is exactly the same properties that allow your amazing macro to boil 15 dimensions of a problem down into a single beautiful one line piece of code that also make it an unacceptable liability that should never be allowed into a mature codebase [1]. Because if the macro didn't exhibit that amazing sublte complex behavior then it wouldn't be powerful. But exactly by doing that, it is now something that nobody new can understand. There is also a fraction of the software "power" equation for which it is a win-win: more power equals less overall non-essential complexity in the system and the burden of propagating the associated knowledge is lower than what is saved. However distinguishing the above two things is completely non-trivial and if you can't actually do that well you need to fall back on the side of avoiding overly powerful behaviors if you want to have an actual long term, large scale, maintainable outcome. [1] Obviously this is an overreaching statement. But to a first approximation this is true and the exceptions by definition have to be rare.
  • goatlover 8y ago
    I wonder what the difference is between a DSL in Lisp/Smalltalk and a framework or powerful library like React, Rails or Pandas as far as complexity and learning curves go. Is it that the frameworks and libraries are typically maintained outside the team, and if popular, are widely known?
    • Viliam1234 8y ago
      > Is it that the frameworks and libraries are typically maintained outside the team, and if popular, are widely known? Pretty sure this is it. A framework developed in the company can be a horrible thing; and avoiding it may be politically impossible, because someone important has approved spending a ton of money on developing it.
• reikonomusha 8y ago
  The fact that dozens of companies have been built around millions of lines of Common Lisp code at all levels of abstraction solving some of the most complicated problems is a testament to the scalability of Lisp. What has changed is that most software shops aren’t solving technical problems anymore. Most places are engaged in the business of plumbing—connect this database (whose problems are solved) to this dashboard (whose problems are solved)—but many of us don’t want to admit it. It’s not glamorous and Silicon Valley prefers to keep its death grip on titles like “Senior Solutions Architect.” Plumbing doesn’t necessarily need expressive power of a programming language, but I contend that problem-solving greatly benefits from it.
  • kazinator 8y ago
    this hasn't really changed. Yesteryear it was Visual Basic, reviled by anyone coming from a Computer Science background. Most if it was "connect to database". Prior to that, 4GL's: dBase III derivatives, right through Microsoft's (eventually) FoxPro. Before that COBOL. There has always been "plumbing" for as long as computers have been "business machines".
    • reikonomusha 8y ago
      I think the proportions have shifted significantly. (Proportion of “problem solving” to “plumbing”.) There’s at least a couple orders of magnitude more software and services available to use and connect to today than there was 25 years ago.
      • antt 8y ago
        Plumbing is not what you read in your textbooks about. It has always been the case that the majority of programmers are plumbers. As a fraction of people I would be surprised if we do not have more people working on blue skies problems today because all the tools are available for free, as opposed to the 80s when a workstation with the software on it cost 30% of the developers yearly salary.
  • untangle 8y ago
• drmeister 8y ago
  We are traveling down this road. We've implemented Clasp (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git) - an implementation of Common Lisp that interoperates with C++ and uses llvm as the backend. On top of this, we built Cando (https://github.com/drmeister/cando.git https://github.com/drmeister/cando.git) - a computational chemistry programming environment for designing large molecules. The end of our story hasn't been written yet. Clasp could be used for a lot of other things.
  • reikonomusha 8y ago
    To add to cutting-edge (& open source) scientific applications, Rigetti Computing uses Common Lisp for their quantum optimizing compiler [1] and high-speed quantum simulator [2]. [1] https://github.com/rigetti/quilc https://github.com/rigetti/quilc [2] https://github.com/rigetti/qvm https://github.com/rigetti/qvm
  • flavio81 8y ago
    And one of the most serious and cutting edge graph databases, Allegro Graph, is a Common Lisp software. The engine that does the core stuff at Grammarly is also a CL program. DrMeister is an example of how an advanced hacker uses cutting edge tools to get things done.
• untangle 8y ago
  > My theory, completely made up and untested, is that these powerful Lisp/Smalltalk systems weave code and brains together in a way that amplifies both. It’s very organic, very hard to document, and thus it becomes very hard to absorb new brains into the system. < Here's a simpler and less mystical theory. These programming systems are fundamentally image-based, and much of their leverage comes from the coder's ability to leverage all aspects of the meta-system. However, the more the core image is evolved the easier it is for a team to get out of sync. This is the ultimate namespace clash. A slew of other highly-productive languages share this feature, e.g., APL and Forth.
• StefanHoutzager 8y ago
  I put a reaction on the site of the writer of the blog, but it looks like he removed it. So I'll repeat here. The text misses structure, clearness and the writer makes the same assumpion as Paul Graham, namely that a programmer thinks in the programming language he uses. To start with the last: "to write a good program, we need to think above the code level. Programmers spend a lot of time thinking about how to code, and many coding methods have been proposed: test-driven development, agile programming, and so on. But if the only sorting algorithm a programmer knows is bubble sort, no such method will produce code that sorts in O(n log n) time. Nor will it turn an overly complex conception of how a program should work into simple, easy to maintain code. We need to understand our programming task at a higher level before we start writing code. [..] There are two things I specify about programs: what they do and how they do it. Often, the hard part of writing a piece of code is figuring out what it should do. Once we understand that, coding is easy." (Leslie Lamport, https://archive.li/2zZKy https://archive.li/2zZKy). Sentences in de Groot's blog like "these powerful Lisp/Smalltalk systems weave code and brains together in a way that amplifies both." are incomprehensible. The question at the end of the blog looks rhetorical to me "I think I’ll end while hoping that someone out there on planet Earth reads this and proves me wrong :)". It is not clear what should be proved wrong, I suspect the writer is satisfied with his musings.
• a-saleh 8y ago
  I would say there are several languages that straddle the line. AFAIK there exist 50+ people teams that use i.e. ocaml (Jane street, Facebook), haskell (gallois, Facebook, Google), erlang (whatsapp, pivotal) I would say that beyond i.e. 10 developers you suddenly need to have onboarding solved. You need to be able to teach your new hires. You need to have community beyond your workgroup to ask questions. You need decent library support. I would say it is beyond 50 where your leads start to worry you didn't `go with IBM` so to speak. You suddenly can't just hire an expert. And you can't coast on the fact your programmers find the language familliar. Like, I joined 4 people team working in clojure. It was fine. You mostly could see "oh, this is where the macro magic starts, and here I need to grok protocols first and here I need to grok transducers first". Then my manager got nervous that he couldn't hire new people fast enough so we had to do a python rewrite :-/ Different team, different project, 60+ people, python. You'd think, it is just python. But you never know when there is a metaclass hiding behind an inheritance chain. There are parts, where we might have single person understand the code. Sometimes they left year ago.
• tmaly 8y ago
  I think it really comes down to the availability of training material. Look at the amount of material for Python compared to say SmallTalk