DanWeinreb

5 ms·

1.
by DanWeinreb 15y ago
I totally agree about the families. That's way, way over the line. IANAL so I don't know whether there are actually laws being broken here, but there might be; freedom of speech in US law has exceptions for threats and putting people into
2.
by DanWeinreb 15y ago
There isn't any one "self-taught programmer" who can be characterized, so a lot of these comments are claiming to be more general than I think is fair. I have close friends who are utterly top-notch software engineers who didn't learn any o
3.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
About your last paragraph, I agree 100% All of that is more important than choice of language.
4.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
Peter, you imply that Python is better for, or more like, pseudo-code, but why is it better? In my opinion, it is better for most people because they were taught syntaxes more like that of Python than that of Lisp. An important factor in
5.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
A function definition is, in general, far away from the function call. If you think this problem is more severe for macros than for functions, then you should articulate why. You may well have a very valid point in your mind but I think i
6.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
At the International Lisp Conference last year, I put in an evening event called the "Great Macro Debate", in which these issues were discussed. (We encouraged humor, and flaming as long as it was witty, so it was a lot of fun.) What you
7.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
Hello, my co-worker, whoever you are. Yes, Common Lisp should have dictionary literals. I don't know why there hasn't been a commonly-used reader macro for this. (Emacs Lisp mode and other tools would have to know about it, so it needs t
8.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
Oh, it's so ugly, and it hasn't been checked for mistakes, etc. I'd be embarrassed to have my name associated with it.
9.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
I agree. But if you find yourself with an employer who requires that everything be written one of a few languages, and Lisp isn't on the menu, I'd take Python over C++ in a heartbeat.
10.
by DanWeinreb 16y ago
I tried writing an extensive Common Lisp vs. Python paper (yes, I have seen all of the existing ones), but it got too big and out of hand. One of interesting developments in Python recently are decorators, which allow some interesting meta
11.
by DanWeinreb 18y ago
I guess so, but actually I don't think that Java and CLOS have such a different idea of what OOP means. They just have different specific features. CLOS has multimethods and multiple inheritance; Java has explicit interfaces. Frankly, mul
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by DanWeinreb 18y ago
It's true that when people learn object-oriented programming, and they learn about inheritance, they tend to think that inheritance is something you should be using heavily all over the place. It takes some experience to learn where inheri
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by DanWeinreb 18y ago
Yes. That's why you want a multi-paradigm language, in which all of those methods of writing code are available. The trick is to figure out how to provide all of them in a way that is well-integrated. I feel that Common Lisp does this ve
14.
by DanWeinreb 18y ago
Exactly. If your IDE can just generate it, then why is it needed at all? And, as I said, it makes the code harder to read. You have to look over all the boilerplate and see if it's all exactly the usual boilerplate, or whether one or two
15.
by DanWeinreb 18y ago
I was one of the designers at BEA for four years. (BEA made WebLogic, a leading J2EE server.) Indeed, J2EE requires a lot of annoying boilerplate. Yes, you have to let the IDE handle it for you, which is fine for writing code but not so
16.
by DanWeinreb 18y ago
C succeeded because it was the language of Unix, and it rode to success on Unix's success. C++ did indeed succeed because so many people knew C. Java has very little to do with C, except for the surface syntax, which makes it look as if i
17.
by DanWeinreb 18y ago
That's an amusing idea, but it is not the case. I used Lisp extensively at the MIT AI Lab, at Symbolics (I was a founder), and now at ITA Software. The people worked together as teams very well in all places. The fact that you're using L