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As a Lisp hacker, I am somewhat stunned to learn that the world suffers from too much Lisp philosophy and that Lisp is unmathematical. Not to mention that Eric
by mtraven 13y ago
As a Lisp hacker, I am somewhat stunned to learn that the world suffers from too much Lisp philosophy and that Lisp is unmathematical. Not to mention that Eric Raymond is a spokesman for Lisp.
Actually there is a somewhat valid and interesting point in that essay, obscured by crap. There are differences between numerical computing culture and symbolic computing culture; people should know both. But from where I sit hardly anyone these days is familiar with symbolic computing while everyone either claims to be or wants to be a “data scientist”, that is, do numerical machine learning. Nothing wrong with that, but I have a hard time seeing numbers as the underdog in this fight.
- xixi77 13y agoI think what he argues against is a third culture, where the focus is on implementation of an algorithm in the code, rather than on the algorithm itself -- and generally, the algorithm is what matters more. Just a couple months ago I've seen some code that spent most of the time traversing the entire (large) data structure and counting elements satisfying certain conditions, while 5 minutes of looking at the actual math was all that was needed to see that the count was a simple function of known quantities. But, his valid point is indeed obscured by a lot of crap and strawmen :(