4 ms·

I have to disagree with you, but remember this is my own milage. :) C++/C#/Java, less so Ruby, are really all kind of the same, OO languages, 3 statically type

by oulu2006 12y ago

I have to disagree with you, but remember this is my own milage. :) C++/C#/Java, less so Ruby, are really all kind of the same, OO languages, 3 statically typed and one not. But basically, they use similar ideas with different syntactical sugar. I've recently moved to using Clojure/Lisp and I kid you not when not just the language but the tooling allows me to be an order of magnitude more effective when shipping production code. I'm basically ruined, and now find it hard to get a job because I refuse to code in any other language. Because I want to be able to: spend time with the family, walk the dog, go surfing at 6am every morning, go to live jazz....._and_ still make sure I ship quality stuff on time. Clojure/Lips lets me do this :) I loved the article because it was basically everything I've realised in the last decade; I am way more effective in one particular set of tools than another, and I don't want to have to learn python or Go or whatever, and all their associated libraries, community and quirks. I just want to use the shit I know and go do something else with my life :) This is MHO and like I said milage will vary. Oh about the job thing, I decided to start my own company so I could build it how I know I will be best able to do it.

eropple 12y ago
Disagreeing is how we learn, yeah? Almost as if relating different points of view is a good way to expand one's horizons. Thanks for being cool about it! I'm not unfamiliar with Clojure or Lisps in general; personally, I can't think as well in that mode and it doesn't map well to what I do (either in terms of work or personal projects), but I get it. They're nice, for a certain kind of thinking that I don't find myself needing that often. I didn't mean to imply that there aren't tools where I'm more effective, because they're better tools, to be sure, (by my lights, Ruby is a better tool than Python and carving bits into a spinning disk with my teeth is a superior option to Go) but I find that after a certain point within an environment I've put together in my head a sufficient playbook where missing certain things here or there doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the process of building something. Libraries, quirks...meh. I went back to PHP a few weeks ago after not touching it for years and it all came back in fifteen minutes or so. Maybe I'm just wired for it? I dunno.
- lostcolony 12y ago
  Not trying to make a point or anything, but from my own experiences, people definitely seem to align differently to different languages and paradigms. I know for myself, when I got a chance to code professionally in Erlang, I was hooked, and could not see myself going back to Java or a mainstream scripting language. Having to think and model problems concurrently, think about failure, etc, is so natural a fit for my brain that trying to fit a language that doesn't have those as first class constructs feels stifling, and having to eschew those concerns to write something that ignores the considerations Erlang prioritizes breaks my brain; I've tried it for timed coding events and it just did not work (i.e., realizing after the fact "Oh, yeah, I totally didn't need to spend time making sure that my supervisor tree made sense, that state was persisted properly, and resumable in the event of restart"). And yet it's not totally ideal, either; I care deeply about typing, and wanting to squeeze the most 'correctness' as I can from static analysis, and Dialyzer just isn't quite sufficient to fully scratch that itch. Meanwhile I've seen some teammates who, while having the same diligence in thought, tend to be far more sequential, far more inclined toward single threaded models, reserving concurrency for the truly necessary cases, and more concerned with try/catch style error handling, than ensuring proper typing (Dialyzer) and otherwise letting it fail (at least until we know what we -really- need to handle). Both I and my teammates have very similar backgrounds, coming from a predominantly Java background, some with a bit of .Net, Javascript, etc, with a smattering of mainstream scripting languages thrown in, and of course, we're all working on the same project. Yet our 'taking' to the language and its paradigms varies pretty drastically. I think people, especially the HN crowd, miss that. PG's "Blub" paradox is viewed as the rule, and obviously everyone thinks they're at the top (or at least, as high up as is pragmatic for their domain), and while it's certainly true that you can't appreciate what you're missing if you don't at least understand it, people's brains work in very different ways. Languages certainly vary, and some are definitely better than others along a given axis, but I think it's unfair to take one's own experiences as objective truth. Even apart from domain differences, "This language made me 10x more effective"; yes, but is that due to the language, or due to your thought processes naturally fitting it? Will someone else who thinks differently find the methods of expressing problems in that language so naturally efficient that they'll see the same gains, or will it actually slow them down, even after learning it, because it isn't as good a fit for them?
nostrademons 12y ago
I'm curious as to your background before moving to Lisp? There's a huge gap in productivity - at least for small, exploratory, green-field projects - between C++/C#/Java and Lisp. There's a much smaller gap between Python/Ruby and Lisp, enough that a couple prominent Lispers [1][2] think that they are perfectly acceptable Lisps. I like Lisp. I was pretty obsessed with it in college, and have gone so far as to implement a couple of them [3][4]. But my experience is that I'm perfectly fine with Python. Sure, I miss macros and conditions and CLOS. But that's all made up for by the awesome libraries available in Python, the ease with which I can express my algorithms, and the syntactic prettiness. I'm using it for my startup; I was just thinking this morning (while poking at a unit test in the REPL) that it's just as good or better than my Lisp experience ever was. [1] http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html [2] http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/ http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta... [3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... [4] https://github.com/nostrademons/arclite https://github.com/nostrademons/arclite
- oulu2006 12y ago
  Background has been mostly in C/Java and Scala. Scala for the past 3 years. It's a fantastically complicated language with even its creator Martin Odersky looking to do a major rethink and turn it into something simpler [1]. I never could finish reading the language standard. There was a lot of effort put into a lot of libraries that just made it harder to use Scala, like Scalaz which pimped almost every standard scala library class. Almost every time I went to use an external library I had to also learn the DSL that came along with it (the popular dispatch library for HTTP requests, "dispatch", needs a periodic table to decipher how to use it [2]). Then usually after that cognitive load I would encounter the inevitable limitations of the DSL and find no-way out of DSL hell; I went through 4 different DB libraries, trending down from ORM-high, ORM-ligher, ORM-almost nothing to "just some string interpolation around SQL". Some people find a lot of pleasure in debating language feature X and Y, and at first I cared about that, I really tried, but I was just fooling myself, I didn't really. I like Lisp and specifically Clojure, for a number of reasons, with a lot of those reasons being because it's the _same_ .....everywhere. I read Clojure code like I read English, I can glance at a piece of Clojure and not wonder why there is an implicit argument that needs to passed and where the compiler might be finding it; the rules for Scala static implicit resolution go in and out even after reading them a few times for me. Clojure has a lot of improvements on CLOS, I'm not sure how much Clojure experience you've had? There's enough differences that some of the arguments I noticed in the paper (which seem to be really just syntactical) on why ruby is an acceptable Lisp don't really apply to Clojure. For example, in Clojure you don't use lambda, you use "fn" to do the same thing. One of the things I really like about Clojure is that I get to run it on the JVM, which still beats hands down the Ruby VM, AFAIK, I did check a little while ago. I'm not that familiar with the Python REPL, but Clojure's is pretty good and I love being able to jack into production when I have to and modify executing code to do tracing or debugging without having to restart it :) I know, it should never get to that point, but testing only covers so much. Ok, I think I'll leave it at that. Another poster on this thread made a comment around, people think in different ways, some people love thinking C++ and classes for everything....I'm not one of those people, I want to just say exactly what I want to say and nothing else; if I want a class I'll make one, else get it out of my way. I think LISP so when I type it's an almost 1-1 correspondence. Cheers! p.s. nice work on the Javascript port of arc, I didn't know that had been done. [1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609013/java/scala-founder--language-due-for--fundamental-rethink-.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609013/java/scala-founder-... [2] http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html

eropple 12y ago

Disagreeing is how we learn, yeah? Almost as if relating different points of view is a good way to expand one's horizons. Thanks for being cool about it! I'm not unfamiliar with Clojure or Lisps in general; personally, I can't think as well in that mode and it doesn't map well to what I do (either in terms of work or personal projects), but I get it. They're nice, for a certain kind of thinking that I don't find myself needing that often. I didn't mean to imply that there aren't tools where I'm more effective, because they're better tools, to be sure, (by my lights, Ruby is a better tool than Python and carving bits into a spinning disk with my teeth is a superior option to Go) but I find that after a certain point within an environment I've put together in my head a sufficient playbook where missing certain things here or there doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the process of building something. Libraries, quirks...meh. I went back to PHP a few weeks ago after not touching it for years and it all came back in fifteen minutes or so. Maybe I'm just wired for it? I dunno.

lostcolony 12y ago
Not trying to make a point or anything, but from my own experiences, people definitely seem to align differently to different languages and paradigms. I know for myself, when I got a chance to code professionally in Erlang, I was hooked, and could not see myself going back to Java or a mainstream scripting language. Having to think and model problems concurrently, think about failure, etc, is so natural a fit for my brain that trying to fit a language that doesn't have those as first class constructs feels stifling, and having to eschew those concerns to write something that ignores the considerations Erlang prioritizes breaks my brain; I've tried it for timed coding events and it just did not work (i.e., realizing after the fact "Oh, yeah, I totally didn't need to spend time making sure that my supervisor tree made sense, that state was persisted properly, and resumable in the event of restart"). And yet it's not totally ideal, either; I care deeply about typing, and wanting to squeeze the most 'correctness' as I can from static analysis, and Dialyzer just isn't quite sufficient to fully scratch that itch. Meanwhile I've seen some teammates who, while having the same diligence in thought, tend to be far more sequential, far more inclined toward single threaded models, reserving concurrency for the truly necessary cases, and more concerned with try/catch style error handling, than ensuring proper typing (Dialyzer) and otherwise letting it fail (at least until we know what we -really- need to handle). Both I and my teammates have very similar backgrounds, coming from a predominantly Java background, some with a bit of .Net, Javascript, etc, with a smattering of mainstream scripting languages thrown in, and of course, we're all working on the same project. Yet our 'taking' to the language and its paradigms varies pretty drastically. I think people, especially the HN crowd, miss that. PG's "Blub" paradox is viewed as the rule, and obviously everyone thinks they're at the top (or at least, as high up as is pragmatic for their domain), and while it's certainly true that you can't appreciate what you're missing if you don't at least understand it, people's brains work in very different ways. Languages certainly vary, and some are definitely better than others along a given axis, but I think it's unfair to take one's own experiences as objective truth. Even apart from domain differences, "This language made me 10x more effective"; yes, but is that due to the language, or due to your thought processes naturally fitting it? Will someone else who thinks differently find the methods of expressing problems in that language so naturally efficient that they'll see the same gains, or will it actually slow them down, even after learning it, because it isn't as good a fit for them?

nostrademons 12y ago

I'm curious as to your background before moving to Lisp? There's a huge gap in productivity - at least for small, exploratory, green-field projects - between C++/C#/Java and Lisp. There's a much smaller gap between Python/Ruby and Lisp, enough that a couple prominent Lispers [1][2] think that they are perfectly acceptable Lisps. I like Lisp. I was pretty obsessed with it in college, and have gone so far as to implement a couple of them [3][4]. But my experience is that I'm perfectly fine with Python. Sure, I miss macros and conditions and CLOS. But that's all made up for by the awesome libraries available in Python, the ease with which I can express my algorithms, and the syntactic prettiness. I'm using it for my startup; I was just thinking this morning (while poking at a unit test in the REPL) that it's just as good or better than my Lisp experience ever was. [1] http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html [2] http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/ http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta... [3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... [4] https://github.com/nostrademons/arclite https://github.com/nostrademons/arclite

oulu2006 12y ago
Background has been mostly in C/Java and Scala. Scala for the past 3 years. It's a fantastically complicated language with even its creator Martin Odersky looking to do a major rethink and turn it into something simpler [1]. I never could finish reading the language standard. There was a lot of effort put into a lot of libraries that just made it harder to use Scala, like Scalaz which pimped almost every standard scala library class. Almost every time I went to use an external library I had to also learn the DSL that came along with it (the popular dispatch library for HTTP requests, "dispatch", needs a periodic table to decipher how to use it [2]). Then usually after that cognitive load I would encounter the inevitable limitations of the DSL and find no-way out of DSL hell; I went through 4 different DB libraries, trending down from ORM-high, ORM-ligher, ORM-almost nothing to "just some string interpolation around SQL". Some people find a lot of pleasure in debating language feature X and Y, and at first I cared about that, I really tried, but I was just fooling myself, I didn't really. I like Lisp and specifically Clojure, for a number of reasons, with a lot of those reasons being because it's the _same_ .....everywhere. I read Clojure code like I read English, I can glance at a piece of Clojure and not wonder why there is an implicit argument that needs to passed and where the compiler might be finding it; the rules for Scala static implicit resolution go in and out even after reading them a few times for me. Clojure has a lot of improvements on CLOS, I'm not sure how much Clojure experience you've had? There's enough differences that some of the arguments I noticed in the paper (which seem to be really just syntactical) on why ruby is an acceptable Lisp don't really apply to Clojure. For example, in Clojure you don't use lambda, you use "fn" to do the same thing. One of the things I really like about Clojure is that I get to run it on the JVM, which still beats hands down the Ruby VM, AFAIK, I did check a little while ago. I'm not that familiar with the Python REPL, but Clojure's is pretty good and I love being able to jack into production when I have to and modify executing code to do tracing or debugging without having to restart it :) I know, it should never get to that point, but testing only covers so much. Ok, I think I'll leave it at that. Another poster on this thread made a comment around, people think in different ways, some people love thinking C++ and classes for everything....I'm not one of those people, I want to just say exactly what I want to say and nothing else; if I want a class I'll make one, else get it out of my way. I think LISP so when I type it's an almost 1-1 correspondence. Cheers! p.s. nice work on the Javascript port of arc, I didn't know that had been done. [1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609013/java/scala-founder--language-due-for--fundamental-rethink-.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609013/java/scala-founder-... [2] http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html