mikelevins

67 ms·

481.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I can offer only anecdotal evidence; take it for what it's worth (not much, I know). I lived and worked in the Bay Area for a little over fifteen years, almost two thirds of it at Apple, and almost a third of it at a successful startup
482.
by mikelevins 10y ago
"the magic is gone" I first went to work at Apple in January of 1988, at the end of the era that Woz described as making whatever they felt like and throwing it over the fence to ravening crowds who were throwing bales of money ov
483.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Speaking up when I should have kept my mouth shut. Keeping my mouth shut when I should have spoken up. Giving in to the wrong impulses. Failing to act on the right impulses. Missed opportunities to be kind or helpful or compassionate. Hurti
484.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Fair enough. That's interesting.
485.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Well, but you initially said that HyperCard "had to die", presumably because it was user-programmable. You seem to be implying that Apple had a conscious policy of opposing user programming. That definitely was not the case at the
486.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Ralph lacked call/cc, as you suggest. It did support upward continuations, or "exits", using a special form called bind-exit. Scheme implementations of CLOS are much more common now than they were in 1992. The only ones I rem
487.
by mikelevins 10y ago
BASIC was a product for Apple customers; as far as I know it was never a mainstream choice for writing system or application software at Apple. The first 6502 assembler I ever used was written in BASIC, but that was on a Commodore machine,
488.
by mikelevins 10y ago
The s-expression version of Dylan was my all-time favorite programming language. I've tried to be interested in the present version of Dylan, but it hasn't worked. The first version of the OS for Newton was written in a language c
489.
by mikelevins 10y ago
"Obsolete" is overstating it. You could do a lot with HyperCard. People did. Apple management started talking about cutting it pretty much immediately. It didn't directly generate any revenue--Apple gave it away for free. It
490.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I've been sort of thinking of fiddling with a Lisp on the cog vm for a while. That vm does a bunch of things I want (including the images people are talking about here).
491.
by mikelevins 10y ago
On the one hand, you are of course correct that the meanings of words are defined by usage. On the other hand, that observation entirely misses Alan Kay's point.
492.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I occurs to me that I reported the things that were most interesting for me to work on, not necessarily most interesting in any other way. Maybe people would think it's interesting that I wrote the first version of the code in MacOS 9
493.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Well, let's see. Beasties was a pond-life simulation on the Mac, circa 1989. It was a Common Lisp program loosely based on a BASIC and assembly-language program I had written earlier that ran Conway's Life with 4 slightly-differen
494.
by mikelevins 10y ago
My point is that you don"t know yourself, either. You know in any given moment whatever self you have constructed from the sensations, emotions, inferences, and memories available to you. It "s conventional to assume that there is
495.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I'm guessing that people don't usually really want an interpreted language; usually what they want is a language they like, and the one they like happens to be interpreted. I can imagine reasons to want an interpreted language. As
496.
by mikelevins 10y ago
In context of the thought experiment there can be more than one person with equal claim to be the person that you believe yourself to be. For example, given the postulated copying technology there could be Two or ten or a hundred people wit
497.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I like to use a simple name generator, used to generate names for game characters. It's virtues are that it's simple enough to write in less than an hour, complex enough to give you a sense of how the language and its standard lib
498.
by mikelevins 10y ago
You're asking for a list of functions that takes interactive programming into account, and I'll give you one, but first I want to make the point that it isn't all about lists of functions or features. It's about a langua
499.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I work for anyone who wants to pay an old sick Lisp hacker and tech writer with a great resume and no patience for whiteboard interviews to do good work. Lots of times that's nobody, but just lately it's been a Xerox PARC research
500.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Speaking as a longtime (nearly 30 years) Common Lisp programmer, I agree with what you've said here, but I would add one thing more. Common Lisp is one of a small number of languages that represent an approach to programming that is so
501.
by mikelevins 10y ago
I love it. I grabbed and tested it out on OSX and Linux Mint. Its design is eerily close to that of my own hobby language, but better developed. Maybe I should abandon the hobby and just use Stanza. Didn't see a repl, though, or an ema
502.
by mikelevins 10y ago
Yeah, it's broken. Google studied their own interview process, according to Lazlo Bock, examining tens of thousands of hiring decisions. The study concluded that their process was no better than random chance at finding good candidates
503.
by mikelevins 11y ago
It's a set of tools and frameworks that make it convenient to use the Gambit Scheme compiler to develop apps for several platforms. There are a variety of reasons that someone might choose it over Clojure or ClojureScript: - they like
504.
by mikelevins 11y ago
Nobody has to explain why nobody uses it. For one thing, the claim is an exaggeration. Lisp does get used. It gets used enough to keep a small number of Lisp companies alive. Yeah, it's a niche language; so what? People have been claim
505.
by mikelevins 11y ago
It's not an either/or situation--or at least it shouldn't be. Static and dynamic type systems are not opposites. They're not sworn enemies. They don't necessarily have to be alternatives; it's reasonable to wan
506.
by mikelevins 11y ago
Location: Northwest Arkansas, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Haskell, Java, Objective-C, C, Python, Javascript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, XML, Unix, Linux, OSX, iOS Résumé/CV: https
507.
by mikelevins 12y ago
An interview process has become fashionable in which candidates are asked to solve brain teasers or write code or pseudocode on whiteboards while the interviewers look on. Personally, I stink at both tasks and have never done well in an int
508.
by mikelevins 15y ago
I notice that it doesn't support multiple inheritance or multimethods; out of curiosity, is that because of a principled objection to them, or more because it wouldn't be convenient to implement them?