
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991) - simonpure
http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
======
DonHopkins
[http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/speaker/Richard+P.+Gabriel](http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/speaker/Richard+P.+Gabriel)

Biography: Richard P. Gabriel

Dr Richard P. “Dick” Gabriel is a leader in the Lisp/OOP community, known for
his book “Innovation Happens Elsewhere”, his essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News,
How to Win Big”, and the "Gabriel” Lisp benchmarks that became a standard way
of benchmarking Lisp implementations. Dr Gabriel is also the recipient of the
recipient of Association for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award, and the
2004 Allen Newell Award.

With a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, and an MFA
in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 1998, Dr Gabriel was described in the
Alan Newell Award as stretching “the imagination of computer scientists with
ideas and innovations from other fields” and he combines these into
presentations to technology audiences that he describes as being “audacious
set-piece guerilla performances”.

Dick has been a researcher at Stanford University, company president and Chief
Technical Officer at Lucid, Inc., vice president of development at ParcPlace-
Digitalk, a management consultant for several startups and Sun Microsystems,
and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Presentation: I Throw Itching Powder at Tulips

[http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/presentation/I%20Throw%20Itch...](http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/presentation/I%20Throw%20Itching%20Powder%20at%20Tulips)

[http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-
berlin-2013/slides/RichardP.Gabri...](http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-
berlin-2013/slides/RichardP.Gabriel_IThrowItchingPowderAtTulips.pdf)

------
DonHopkins
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/15/the-rise-of-worse-is-
bet...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/15/the-rise-of-worse-is-better/)

In 2000 an OOPSLA panel was convened to debate the question of whether worse
was still better. Gabriel wrote a position paper arguing for the-right-thing.
A month later, he wrote a second position paper arguing for worse-is-better!

[https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper....](https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper.pdf)

[https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ProWorseIsBetterPosition.pd...](https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ProWorseIsBetterPosition.pdf)

------
dang
A bit from 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628170)

There's more on the Worse Is Better side:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22worse%20is%20better%22%20dreamsongs.com%20comments%3E0&sort=byDate&type=story)

------
mark_l_watson
Yes indeed, I really like this almost twenty year old article. It seems like I
re-read it every several years.

Lisp is in even better shape now than twenty years ago:

Application delivery is a solved problem. On the commercial side LispWorks and
Franz have portable UI frameworks and application delivery mechanisms that are
excellent.

On the open source side, SBCL and Clozure are excellent, with different
strength. Both have robust application deployment capabilities.

In the non-Common Lisp world, Racket (Scheme) just keeps getting better, and
also has a good application delivery mechanism and portable UI that looks
great in macOS and not so good on Linux.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> Clozure

Clojure

~~~
mark_l_watson
I used Clojure for a few years on two jobs, but in this context I did intend
Clozure Common Lisp.

I also wrote a small side project in Clojure about ten years ago
[http://cookingspace.com/](http://cookingspace.com/) that I used to track
nutrients as percentage of daily requirement in my recipes.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Today I learned!

------
pfarrell
Haven’t read it but remembered this paper being mentioned in Guy Steele’s
fabulous “Growing a language” talk [0].

I don’t want to give anything away about the talk (which is one of my absolute
favorites), but Steele says about the title of this paper: “... the truth is
that Dick Gabriel knew how to choose words with punch“

0: [https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0](https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0)

------
DonHopkins
It's Battle of the Manifestos day on HN! Compare and contrast this with "Ted
Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585258)

~~~
ohithereyou
Shitposting and its consequences have been a disaster for Intenet discourse.

~~~
kragen
Your point would be more plausible if you weren't responding to someone who's
been "shitposting" on the internet (your "Intenet") for over 30 years and
whose "shitposting" has been highly educational for generations of people,
including me — especially HCI researchers, of course.

~~~
phlakaton
Nobody is above the law.

~~~
kragen
The "law" you are proposing is a bad one, based on either faulty observations
or a value system so out of keeping with my own that it might as well belong
to the Ayatollah Khamenei.

~~~
DonHopkins
Since my post hasn't broken any laws, and I haven't murdered anyone, or sent
any bombs in the mail, let's give phlakaton the benefit of the doubt and
assume good faith, that he's not making baseless accusations, and by
"shitposting" he's referring to the actual convicted murderer Ted Kaczynski,
who posted bombs in the mail that killed 3 people and injured 23 people.

Unless he can cite any criminal codes I've violated or people I've murdered,
I'll assume phlakaton is not just being histrionic and totally overreacting by
calling my post "a disaster for Intenet (sic) discourse", or accusing me of
murder.

Speaking of melodramatic shitposting about network based disasters and the
triumph of Worse is Better, from the Unix-Haters handbook which included a
chapter on Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big:

The X-Windows Disaster:

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d39...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d398ebd47)

>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

From The Unix Haters Handbook:

[https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf](https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

>The Rise of Worse Is Better, By Richard P. Gabriel. p. 311.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-
Haters_Handbook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook)

>Contents

>The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system.
Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in
computer science terms, and they were tremendously frustrated by the "worse is
better" design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software
encapsulated.

~~~
phlakaton
Sir, I refer of course to the law of social discourse that most of us adhere
to which says you don't bring Kaczynski completely out of left field to a HN
discussion and not get called out for your foolishness. No matter your assumed
eminence in the community. You are neither half as amusing nor clever in this
moment as you think you are.

Give it a rest.

~~~
DonHopkins
Citations, please. I don't remember that particular law. Can you give me a
link to it, please? Is there a Wikipedia article on it? Is it this one?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_climbing_the_Reic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_climbing_the_Reichstag_dressed_as_Spider-
Man)

I didn't post the Unibomber manifesto. Quite the contrary: I was dismayed that
Ted Kazinsky's manifesto was beating out Richard Gabriel's manifesto, so I
pointed it out to dang, the HN moderator, who flagged it and knocked it off of
the front page.

Did you report it too, or did you [quavering melodramatic Dudley Do-Right
voice] just sit by silently and say nothing while evil was being perpetrated?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q83Jqd2h0Yg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q83Jqd2h0Yg)

