4 ms·

Never heard of this before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule > Any sufficiently c

Never heard of this before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule > Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

throwanem 3y ago
It was 2009, I think, when I found myself implementing a rudimentary Lisp reader in PHP, because while the client had proved fully to understand the concept of list syntax, the client also had proved wholly and with basaltic resolve unwilling to be parted from beloved Excel. Exporting to CSV for upload and processing was just about thinkable, and the only meaningful concession I managed to extract. (The use of Lisp lists to represent tree-structured data wasn't a concession. See, you can generate those with Excel formulas...)
- hinkley 3y ago
  Oh god. I’ve avoided hearing war stories about modernizing excel based companies for ten years. Academically I knew it must still be happening, but emotionally I’d convinced myself everything was daisies and the world had moved on. Next it’ll be extracting applications from notebooks, I suspect.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    That already happens.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    I mean, that story's about to be 15 years old, but I take your point. When I'm asked to prototype something that seems to pose a real danger of the next step being "okay let's deploy this", I do it in Emacs with org-babel. That's more than enough of a programming environment to validate an idea, and like a notebook each code block's results become part of the document, so it's very observable - but thanks in no small part to Emacs's reputation as alien space magic for weirdos, nobody's ever been mad enough to consider trying to jam it in production as-is.

4 ms·

Never heard of this before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule > Any sufficiently c

by albertzeyer 3y ago

throwanem 3y ago
It was 2009, I think, when I found myself implementing a rudimentary Lisp reader in PHP, because while the client had proved fully to understand the concept of list syntax, the client also had proved wholly and with basaltic resolve unwilling to be parted from beloved Excel. Exporting to CSV for upload and processing was just about thinkable, and the only meaningful concession I managed to extract. (The use of Lisp lists to represent tree-structured data wasn't a concession. See, you can generate those with Excel formulas...)
- hinkley 3y ago
  Oh god. I’ve avoided hearing war stories about modernizing excel based companies for ten years. Academically I knew it must still be happening, but emotionally I’d convinced myself everything was daisies and the world had moved on. Next it’ll be extracting applications from notebooks, I suspect.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    That already happens.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    I mean, that story's about to be 15 years old, but I take your point. When I'm asked to prototype something that seems to pose a real danger of the next step being "okay let's deploy this", I do it in Emacs with org-babel. That's more than enough of a programming environment to validate an idea, and like a notebook each code block's results become part of the document, so it's very observable - but thanks in no small part to Emacs's reputation as alien space magic for weirdos, nobody's ever been mad enough to consider trying to jam it in production as-is.