4 ms·

> I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something whic

> I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. This is not unlike a doctoral dissertation. Invest years of your life and effort, produce nice results, have people cheer for you after you successfully defend it and then nobody cares for the results anymore.

myWindoonn 6y ago
The analogy is not great, because the f-expr-based Lisp Kernel [0] did arise from a doctoral dissertation, and is far more interesting than Bel. The Lisp world has respect for Shutt's work but not for Graham's, and that's not by accident. Edit: Hey, I'm just doing what you did. You started this comment thread by both posting a top-level comment, and also starting replies to other folks. So, uh, have you read Shutt's work on Kernel yet? Or are you just going to play this out based on optics? One of us is shilling for some rich fuck, and the other of us is reading historical academic work. [0] https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Haha. Are you going from comment thread to comment thread putting down Bel while plugging other work? Okay.
- bidirectional 6y ago
  Well a more forceful version of your counter-argument would be that Claude Shannon laid the foundations for the information age in his thesis, rather than linking to some obscure Lisp work. But really, that wasn't their point -- most theses go nowhere, the few that do are obvious exceptions to that rule.
alisonkisk 6y ago
At least a dissertation is a school project where you learn a skill to use in future.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  If writing Bel did not make pg better at Lisp and programming generally I will be very much surprised. Producing something that anyone cares about for any length of time is more than almost any school project achieves.
- solveit 6y ago
  PG doesn't need skills, he needs to be fulfilled.

myWindoonn 6y ago

The analogy is not great, because the f-expr-based Lisp Kernel [0] did arise from a doctoral dissertation, and is far more interesting than Bel. The Lisp world has respect for Shutt's work but not for Graham's, and that's not by accident. Edit: Hey, I'm just doing what you did. You started this comment thread by both posting a top-level comment, and also starting replies to other folks. So, uh, have you read Shutt's work on Kernel yet? Or are you just going to play this out based on optics? One of us is shilling for some rich fuck, and the other of us is reading historical academic work. [0] https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Haha. Are you going from comment thread to comment thread putting down Bel while plugging other work? Okay.
bidirectional 6y ago
Well a more forceful version of your counter-argument would be that Claude Shannon laid the foundations for the information age in his thesis, rather than linking to some obscure Lisp work. But really, that wasn't their point -- most theses go nowhere, the few that do are obvious exceptions to that rule.

alisonkisk 6y ago

At least a dissertation is a school project where you learn a skill to use in future.

barry-cotter 6y ago
If writing Bel did not make pg better at Lisp and programming generally I will be very much surprised. Producing something that anyone cares about for any length of time is more than almost any school project achieves.
solveit 6y ago
PG doesn't need skills, he needs to be fulfilled.