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I was at JPL on this Lisp project, and left for Silicon Valley. First place I interviewed was Peter Norvig's startup (that's how I think of it, though it had ac
by abecedarius 7y ago
I was at JPL on this Lisp project, and left for Silicon Valley. First place I interviewed was Peter Norvig's startup (that's how I think of it, though it had actual cofounders and he was an employee). He told me if they'd known they could hire Lispers, they wouldn't be using Java.
Just one datapoint on how things were trending then.
- maliker 7y agoSounds like the lisp programmer skillset doesn't have a strong overlap with the java/python/javascript programmer skillset. Makes me want to learn more lisp. :)
- dreamcompiler 7y agoThere is some overlap with javascript because it's the only one of the three that offers uncrippled lambdas. Or I may be wrong about that; did Java finally add them?
- mst 7y agoES6 offers sane lambdas via => and lexical scoping via let. I can actually program in it without wanting to stab myself, which has previously mostly been limited to perl and various lisps ;)
- skissane 7y agoJava has had lambdas since Java 8. (I don’t know if you’d consider them “crippled” or not; they are less crippled than Python’s.)
- cbsmith 7y agoEven before Java 8, Java had inner classes that if you squinted at them right looked like very syntactically awkward lambdas (indeed, Java 8 lambdas compile down to something that looks an awfully lot like an inner class).