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Just to play devil's advocate here: I'm a frequent contributor on The GWT newsgroups and it's very easy to get annoyed. Specifically, java suffers from a lot o
by rzwitserloot 19y ago
Just to play devil's advocate here:
I'm a frequent contributor on The GWT newsgroups and it's very easy to get annoyed. Specifically, java suffers from a lot of wannabe programmers. For those of you liking the ambiance amongst Ruby and Python groups, you should do yourself a favour and stop advocating the use of Ruby/Python in colleges.
The influx of those idiots will kill your newsgroups and your IRC channels -very- quickly.
Now, as to the LISP community, they aren't usually bothered too much, I'd gather, with wannabees. However, where they do waltz I'm, I can imagine they'll be mentioning Paul Graham's essays. Result: short fused posters take the piss out of you.
And, you have to admit, Paul Graham's ramblings on LISP are a bit out of left field. The problem with promising magical performance with any one programming tool is that you create expectations. I'm fairly sure the expectations created by PG are waaay out of proportion of what you can reasonably expect a functional programming newbie to do in the span of a couple of months.
This isn't an excuse or anything. The chat logs are certainly horrible. Just trying to figure out if I can explain why this is happening.
- far33d 19y agoYes. But I bet a lot of the consternation around the LISP literati circles about PG's essays is because they like LISP the way it is: obscure. If LISP became popular, they wouldn't be as special anymore. It's like the punk rock syndrome - as soon as a band is popular, the original listeners pretend they don't like it anymore (and look down on anyone who isn't "old school")
- pg 19y agoCan you give me an example of a specific paragraph of rambling you consider to be out of left field?
- rzwitserloot 19y agoI'm referring to the tales of orders-of-magnitude flexibility and productivity enhancement, mostly the "Beating the Averages" essay, in other words. Here's a fragment that seems to promise almost magical productivity: It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something. In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was leaking news of their features to us. We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible.
- pg 19y agoThat's out of left field? We were writing code in Lisp, with a read-eval-print loop to test stuff, and they were writing code in C++ with "builds." There's nothing preposterous in claiming we could implement a serious feature in a couple hours. A lot of people could today with Ruby or Python. But there were no Ruby or Python at the time I'm describing. (An early form of Python existed, but few used it.)