6 ms·
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1990) [pdf]
- recursivedoubts 5y agoThis essay contains the famous "Worse is Better" section, made popular by Jamie Zawinski https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/projects/2010-11/WorseIsBetter/index.php/Worse-is-better.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/projec... Summarized as: "When tradeoffs are required in a software system, priority should go to implementation simplicity at the expense of completeness or correctness." See also the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better An interesting aspect of all this is that Gabriel argues with himself in a series of papers under a false name: https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf A great example of someone looking at both sides of an argument.
- rileyphone 5y ago“Worse is better” is in my opinion the crux of software engineering. If you look around it’s pervasive and can even be extrapolated to other areas.
- layer8 5y agoI don’t really see priority going to implementation simplicity much in practice. (Completeness and correctness gets expended nevertheless alright.)
- michaelbrave 5y agoI mean, this is why we have version numbers
- chalst 5y agoRPG has an amusing summary article in which he recounts his failure to figure out whether he was right about this https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago> A great example of someone looking at both sides of an argument. I don't think so, we now call that kind of behaviour a sock puppet account. Why the deception?
- nickkell 5y agoThey weren't doing it to support their original position, but rather arguing against it.
- caslon 5y agoIt was pretty obvious what was happening; naming your fictional debate partner after the most famous pseudonym of all time is as transparent as you can get. There's a long history of people doing exactly this in a variety of fields; it's not deception.
- chalst 5y agoThe name was "Nickieben Bourbaki", a reference to the collective pseudonym "Nicholas Borbaki" of the French mathematician collective. RPG had the idea that other people at Lucid would be interested in participating under this collective name, but that didn't happen.
- recursivedoubts 5y agothese were simpler times mapping today's online behavior onto them is misleading
- jhgb 5y ago> we now call that kind of behaviour a sock puppet account Maybe it was a Socratic puppet.
- recursivedoubts 5y agothe most underrated post in the history of hacker news
- yellowapple 5y ago
- amelius 5y ago> priority should go to implementation simplicity at the expense of completeness or correctness https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- pphysch 5y agoIf "good enough" is "worse" than "perfect", then "worse" is indeed "better". Perfect things never leave the drawing board; good enough things make it into production. Know thy tolerances.
- vindarel 5y agoSo is Lisp in good shape today? See some cool releases of this year: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/rp5lik/what_was_your_favorite_common_lisp_release/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/rp5lik/what_wa... CLOG (GUI in browser), M1 support for SBCL, LispWorks 8, VSCode plugin, Coalton (ML on top of CL), SB-SIMD and many new improvements to SBCL, new Clozure version, we know of more companies using CL...
- jhgb 5y ago> VSCode plugin Wait, what? There's finally something usable in that department?
- phoe-krk 5y agoAlive. https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rheller.alive https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rheller....
- vindarel 5y agoYep. There's also a Jupyter kernel or an Atom plugin if you want. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
- jhgb 5y agoI've already known about Atom and Jupyter, but not about anything actually usable for VS Code.
- chalst 5y agoJulia owes a lot to CL in terms of language design and is doing very well in its niche. Watching how Julia fares in competition with Python can be seen as a kind of test of the Worse is Better hypothesis. Cf. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/about-julia-and-lisp/25119 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/about-julia-and-lisp/25119
- lalos 5y agoI read something here about lisp, that it was too good at letting you make whatever you wanted that libraries that 'carry' other programming languages didn't pop up and that had adverse affects on popularity, etc. If someone remembers this and has the link that would be great.
- AndrewOMartin 5y agoNo time to Google I'm afraid, but I'm pretty sure that's "The curse of LISP".
- AndrewOMartin 5y agoI've now had time to Google, it's The curse of LISP. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
- lalos 5y agoThanks, amazing
- hayley-patton 5y agoIt doesn't exist. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.html https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.ht...