
"The way C handles pointers was a brilliant innovation." (1993 Knuth interview) - crocus
http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html
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13ren
_I spent fifteen years using electronic mail on the ARPANET and the Internet.
Then, in January 1990, I stopped, because it was taking up too much of my time
to sift through garbage._

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fkrueger
I think this paragraph was very interesting:

> All through my life, I've always used the programming language that blended
> best with the debugging system and operating system that I'm using. If I had
> a better debugger for language X, and if X went well with the operating
> system, I would be using that.

I love Lisp, I love Python. But are their debugging tools and OS integration
as good as .NET development or Java development?

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jrockway
_But are their debugging tools and OS integration as good as .NET development
or Java development?_

Most Lisp programmers don't dig themselves into the holes that the .NET and
Java debuggers are good at getting you out of.

Also, if Emacs is your OS, CL integrates quite well.

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amackera
What you're saying is that Python & Lisp debugging tools and OS integration
are as good as .NET and Java. I agree.

The problem is that it's hard to convince other people of that, without
forcing them to try it for a while.

~~~
jrockway
Agreed. UNIX is the IDE for Lisp and Python. It's very functional and very
customizable, but the learning curve is kind of high. So high, in fact, that
most people never realize it's an IDE.

~~~
helveticaman
How high? I've been trying to learn lisp for a while, and it's been kicking my
ass. How long did it take you?

~~~
jrockway
A day spent reading the emacs lisp manual was enough to productive. CL is a
whole 'nother animal, but once you get a feel for the language, it's just a
matter of searching the hyperspec. Eventually you learn that the function you
are trying to implement is probably already built in in about 12 different
variants.

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davidw
> I'm going to have fascicles of about 128 pages coming out twice a year.
> We're gathering four of them before we come out with the first two actually;
> we're going to keep some in the pipeline! Look for the first fascicles in
> 1995 or 1996; they will be beta-test versions of the real books. I'm
> thinking I can finish Volume IV (parts A, B, and C) in the year 2003, Volume
> V in 2008, then come out with new editions of Volume I, II, and III, then
> work on VI and VII... There will be a "Reader's Digest" version of volumes I
> through V.

I guess there's been a little bit of schedule slippage:

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html>

Volume 5 is "Estimated to be ready in 2015."

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stcredzero
Doing away with bare pointers and having "object references" was an even
better one. You get the most useful part of the power of pointers, but none of
the potential headaches.

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wwalker3
I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern
languages (emphasis mine):

"The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely terse language. For
example, where in PASCAL you would say "IF X > 0 THEN...", in IMP you say
"X+=>". In other words, your program was very short. _You felt like you were
writing elegant programs, because there were only a few characters, but you
couldn't read them the next day!_ Being very terse meant that you couldn't
fathom this bunch of marks on the page..."

