4 ms·

> Neither the LH people holding LH scissors nor the RH people holding RH scissors are "wrong". It's just the RH people trying to use LH scissors who are having

by sph 3y ago

> Neither the LH people holding LH scissors nor the RH people holding RH scissors are "wrong". It's just the RH people trying to use LH scissors who are having a bad time. True, and good insight, but it doesn't mean that all scissors, or all languages, are equal. They can all perform computation, but a person with a particular language might create incredible things that another person with another language would have a hard time with. Let's appreciate the difference in tastes, which reflect our different in thought processes and approach to the world, but it does not mean that every language is the same, nor every person is the same. A Lisp virtuoso will build tools which are completely alien in design and operation than tools built by a Java virtuoso. I really don't want to take this off-topic, but this fallacy is very present in our modern approach to human diversity, where instead of celebrating our differences, we simply reduce it to a one-size-fits-all approach. There is enough space for everybody, the result is effectively the same, but you simply can't replicate a Lisp-wielding Paul Graham in any other language.

grugagag 3y ago
Perhaps it has something to do with winner takes all, or maybe it has no connection at all
jasode 3y ago
>, but you simply can't replicate a Lisp-wielding Paul Graham in any other language. But anyone who wants to really dig deeper will wonder about replicating which particular aspect of PG's productivity. If the aspect they care about is the ViaWeb ecommerce site that he sold to Yahoo for a few million, then all of PG's essays[1] about (paraphrasing) "Lisp syntax being their secret weapon to agility and flexibility compared to others using inferior blub languages" ... isn't going to be convincing to others who notice that Amazon ecommerce was built on Perl/Java/C/C++ instead of Lisp. And later, Shopify was built with Ruby on Rails and PHP instead of Lisp. In other words, maybe the secret weapon to building ViaWeb wasn't "Lisp" but instead, "PG's brain". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding) This is why language discussions focusing on "superior syntax" really don't really move the needle when it comes to mass adoption. Yes, Lisp's "code-as-data" is powerful etc, etc but there may be other factors that make that syntax feature not so important in the bigger picture. [1] "Beating the Averages" : http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- civilized 3y ago
  Wild guess here (not a Lisp programmer). When I hear people talking about the practical benefits of Lisp, not just the nice theoretical stuff like homoiconicity and macros, I hear about interactivity. In Lisp it sounds like you can be pretty successful with a more experimental, on-the-fly development process. That might help a crack team push out features faster, but they might produce code that is proven to work more by experiment than by logic, which might mean it's harder to understand and keep building on. This leads to small Lisp shops that beat their competition in a niche but have trouble scaling it to Amazon size.
  - mtreis86 3y ago
    That is remarkably accurate for a wild guess. Lisp code tends to be built from the inside. Working in a REPL, modifying the system state as you go, storing code into a buffer then recompiling and loading it into the image with a keystroke. Recompiling functions as you modify them, without recompiling the rest of the file, updating the code behind some classes without taking the system down, and the interactivity you get from the tooling for debugging and error handling. It all adds up.
  - relaxing 3y ago
    > In Lisp it sounds like you can be pretty successful with a more experimental, on-the-fly development process. That’s a side effect of having a REPL.
    - civilized 3y ago
      By itself this doesn't seem like a distinctive advantage of Lisp anymore. Lots of languages have REPLs. But I'm told that Lisp is more advanced in some way. Better debugging, breakloops, everything can be modified in-flight, etc.
      - lispm 3y ago
        Interactive interfaces (command line interfaces, etc.) are long available: BASIC, Smalltalk, Prolog, APL, UNIX shells, etc. Some of them also used source level interpreters. One simple difference is that the READ EVAL PRINT LOOP of Lisp works with code and data in similar ways. It makes it easy to process lists which are data and also to process lists which are programs. READ reads lists, EVAL evaluates lists & other values (and can be rewritten in itself) and PRINT prints lists. Code is lists and programs are lists, too. In the moment where the REPL uses a source level interpreter, debugging can go very deep, incl. modifying the running source code. That's kind a second nature when one is interactively developing Lisp code: every error stays in the error context and provides a break loop to explore/change/repair the current state - including that each additional error in a break loop just gets us into another break loop level, another level deeper.
pjc50 3y ago
> A Lisp virtuoso will build tools which are completely alien in design and operation than tools built by a Java virtuoso Crossing with the "build what, exactly?" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195055 - does the special alien-ness translate into either greater user satisfaction or greater commercial success? It is possible that there are Lisp virtuosos. It is also possible that you have to be a virtuoso to write Lisp, as is definitely the case for J. Every J program is a tiny work of art. That's why there aren't very many of them. > you simply can't replicate a Lisp-wielding Paul Graham in any other language You can't replicate Tolstoy in any language other than Russian, either. I'm not sure that proves anything other than the existence of unique talents that are also bound to their circumstances?

by sph 3y ago

grugagag 3y ago

Perhaps it has something to do with winner takes all, or maybe it has no connection at all

jasode 3y ago

>, but you simply can't replicate a Lisp-wielding Paul Graham in any other language. But anyone who wants to really dig deeper will wonder about replicating which particular aspect of PG's productivity. If the aspect they care about is the ViaWeb ecommerce site that he sold to Yahoo for a few million, then all of PG's essays[1] about (paraphrasing) "Lisp syntax being their secret weapon to agility and flexibility compared to others using inferior blub languages" ... isn't going to be convincing to others who notice that Amazon ecommerce was built on Perl/Java/C/C++ instead of Lisp. And later, Shopify was built with Ruby on Rails and PHP instead of Lisp. In other words, maybe the secret weapon to building ViaWeb wasn't "Lisp" but instead, "PG's brain". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding) This is why language discussions focusing on "superior syntax" really don't really move the needle when it comes to mass adoption. Yes, Lisp's "code-as-data" is powerful etc, etc but there may be other factors that make that syntax feature not so important in the bigger picture. [1] "Beating the Averages" : http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

civilized 3y ago
Wild guess here (not a Lisp programmer). When I hear people talking about the practical benefits of Lisp, not just the nice theoretical stuff like homoiconicity and macros, I hear about interactivity. In Lisp it sounds like you can be pretty successful with a more experimental, on-the-fly development process. That might help a crack team push out features faster, but they might produce code that is proven to work more by experiment than by logic, which might mean it's harder to understand and keep building on. This leads to small Lisp shops that beat their competition in a niche but have trouble scaling it to Amazon size.
- mtreis86 3y ago
  That is remarkably accurate for a wild guess. Lisp code tends to be built from the inside. Working in a REPL, modifying the system state as you go, storing code into a buffer then recompiling and loading it into the image with a keystroke. Recompiling functions as you modify them, without recompiling the rest of the file, updating the code behind some classes without taking the system down, and the interactivity you get from the tooling for debugging and error handling. It all adds up.
- relaxing 3y ago
  > In Lisp it sounds like you can be pretty successful with a more experimental, on-the-fly development process. That’s a side effect of having a REPL.
  - civilized 3y ago
    By itself this doesn't seem like a distinctive advantage of Lisp anymore. Lots of languages have REPLs. But I'm told that Lisp is more advanced in some way. Better debugging, breakloops, everything can be modified in-flight, etc.
    - lispm 3y ago
      Interactive interfaces (command line interfaces, etc.) are long available: BASIC, Smalltalk, Prolog, APL, UNIX shells, etc. Some of them also used source level interpreters. One simple difference is that the READ EVAL PRINT LOOP of Lisp works with code and data in similar ways. It makes it easy to process lists which are data and also to process lists which are programs. READ reads lists, EVAL evaluates lists & other values (and can be rewritten in itself) and PRINT prints lists. Code is lists and programs are lists, too. In the moment where the REPL uses a source level interpreter, debugging can go very deep, incl. modifying the running source code. That's kind a second nature when one is interactively developing Lisp code: every error stays in the error context and provides a break loop to explore/change/repair the current state - including that each additional error in a break loop just gets us into another break loop level, another level deeper.

pjc50 3y ago

> A Lisp virtuoso will build tools which are completely alien in design and operation than tools built by a Java virtuoso Crossing with the "build what, exactly?" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195055 - does the special alien-ness translate into either greater user satisfaction or greater commercial success? It is possible that there are Lisp virtuosos. It is also possible that you have to be a virtuoso to write Lisp, as is definitely the case for J. Every J program is a tiny work of art. That's why there aren't very many of them. > you simply can't replicate a Lisp-wielding Paul Graham in any other language You can't replicate Tolstoy in any language other than Russian, either. I'm not sure that proves anything other than the existence of unique talents that are also bound to their circumstances?