4 ms·

Well I was born in '84 so it's all history to me ;) I've only ever known compiled, high performing Lisps with unnoticable GC. So it's weird when I still hear p

by adwf 12y ago

Well I was born in '84 so it's all history to me ;) I've only ever known compiled, high performing Lisps with unnoticable GC. So it's weird when I still hear people trotting out the old "bloated, interpreted, slow" line. I sometimes think that the AI winter really took computing in a weird turn, not just Lisp, but computing in general. It feels like we stopped trying to make computers do all the work for us and decided that humans should be doing the work for the computer. So we ended up heading down the path of manual memory management in the C style languages, verbose constrained programming in Java and static typing instead of the easier dynamic. Whilst I agree that at one point, hardware performance was a serious consideration and we needed to squeeze everything we could out of computers - that is no longer the case. We're overwhelmed by hardware performance in most cases. Perhaps that's why we're seeing a resurgence in Lispy languages nowadays?

hga 12y ago
Ah, some more history: In the '80s, a common startup setup that was more powerful than a PC (for a while) and ASCII terminals to a UNIX(TM) box was 3 or so el-cheapo Sun workstations sharing one disk over an Ethernet (or so I've read, I might well prefer the ASCII terminal to a UNIX box, which is what I tended to use). Although also think about the PC starting with ones using the 386 (true 32 bits, the 286 was misbegotten and all but useless except as a fast 8086): both these configurations were cheap, but not all that capable, memory was at a premium as well as virtual memory in the workstation case. So using machine but not programmer efficient C and the like was the zeitgeist. Then about or a bit before the time engineering workstations based on more capable microprocessors were also capable of running Lisp quickly, although without hardly as much error checking, the expert system bubble collapsed. And those promoting it had to find something to blame, and Lisp became it. Or so goes one narrative of it. There was certainly a ... Slough of Despond in programming languages we mortals could use to earn a living about the time you would have started programming seriously (before college, I assume). For Lisper and programming language guy like myself it was very depressing; I think what got us out of that, besides Moore's Law, was the dot com bust, it upset a lot of the conventional wisdom, coupled with a paucity of resources for development. No longer could you, at the extreme, do a wild IPO with an idea and a plan to hire a bunch of blub programmers using a consensus language running on expensive Sun or whatever hardware. You probably get the idea of what lost favor (ask if not). Also, as Paul Graham pointed out, in essays who's influence I can't judge, the above will at best get you average results, and the average result of a startup is failure. He also noted that technical failure was a frequent cause of corporate failure. To take one stark example, compare Facebook competitor Friendster. Whatever promise it had, that the company's board used to wheel and deal, didn't matter when it was just too slow to use. Of course (if I remember correctly), its technical founder was purged by that board. Which also leads into issues of control. We technical people don't need so much money, and the all too common downside of losing control is awful for us, the company, and of course the people we hired for it. So all in all we more tend to call the shots technically, and are able to pull it off. And wild successes like Facebook with PHP and Twitter with Ruby on Rails didn't hurt.

by adwf 12y ago

hga 12y ago

Ah, some more history: In the '80s, a common startup setup that was more powerful than a PC (for a while) and ASCII terminals to a UNIX(TM) box was 3 or so el-cheapo Sun workstations sharing one disk over an Ethernet (or so I've read, I might well prefer the ASCII terminal to a UNIX box, which is what I tended to use). Although also think about the PC starting with ones using the 386 (true 32 bits, the 286 was misbegotten and all but useless except as a fast 8086): both these configurations were cheap, but not all that capable, memory was at a premium as well as virtual memory in the workstation case. So using machine but not programmer efficient C and the like was the zeitgeist. Then about or a bit before the time engineering workstations based on more capable microprocessors were also capable of running Lisp quickly, although without hardly as much error checking, the expert system bubble collapsed. And those promoting it had to find something to blame, and Lisp became it. Or so goes one narrative of it. There was certainly a ... Slough of Despond in programming languages we mortals could use to earn a living about the time you would have started programming seriously (before college, I assume). For Lisper and programming language guy like myself it was very depressing; I think what got us out of that, besides Moore's Law, was the dot com bust, it upset a lot of the conventional wisdom, coupled with a paucity of resources for development. No longer could you, at the extreme, do a wild IPO with an idea and a plan to hire a bunch of blub programmers using a consensus language running on expensive Sun or whatever hardware. You probably get the idea of what lost favor (ask if not). Also, as Paul Graham pointed out, in essays who's influence I can't judge, the above will at best get you average results, and the average result of a startup is failure. He also noted that technical failure was a frequent cause of corporate failure. To take one stark example, compare Facebook competitor Friendster. Whatever promise it had, that the company's board used to wheel and deal, didn't matter when it was just too slow to use. Of course (if I remember correctly), its technical founder was purged by that board. Which also leads into issues of control. We technical people don't need so much money, and the all too common downside of losing control is awful for us, the company, and of course the people we hired for it. So all in all we more tend to call the shots technically, and are able to pull it off. And wild successes like Facebook with PHP and Twitter with Ruby on Rails didn't hurt.