

A "Parallel-ogue" of Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" - edw519
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dness/notes/graham6.html

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bayareaguy
23 July 2003

It also happens to be the most recent entry on that guy's blog. I did find
this comment at the end amusing:

 _And on the topic of Lisp (or APL, as another example) people have voted with
their feet._

I'm would bet Arthur Whitney over at <http://www.kx.com> is as fond of his
secret weapon (K, derived from APL) as pg is for Lisp.

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manvsmachine
"The relationship of C and Unix is unclear to me"...

I basically just stopped reading after that.

~~~
pg
After reading this comment, I was curious about when I stopped reading, so I
went back and checked. Oddly enough, it was after "I fail to see." It wasn't
conscious; I must have just learned to associate that phrase with a 0% chance
of anything interesting following.

------
Hexstream
This guy is a, hum.... "lisp non-getter". An inconsequential sceptic.

~~~
aston
So, you code only in LISP, I take it?

~~~
Hexstream
Good take.

I learned of the existence of Common Lisp about 1 year and 3 months ago, via
PG's essays. There was this mysterious language I kept hearing about on
Slashdot, that supposedly made you a much better programmer for the rest of
your days if you learned it, and that was so much more advanced than Java,
that was my only language at the time because I was "fresh out of college" (I
actually dropped out at term 5 of 6 for mostly inconsequential reasons, one of
them was gaming, now I stopped it entirely) and didn't know any better. Though
in a sense, I did know better, because I was beginning to really "bang my
head" on the "low ceiling" of Java, I was somehow attracted to metaprogramming
techniques, I understood the repugnance of the boilerplate code, etc.

So, I read about all of PG's essays and researched it for 2 weeks, and I was
hooked. I absolutely wanted to have those cool features like (apply) (and
everything else really great about lisp), that I had so fondly dreamt of.

I spent the next year learning Common Lisp while writing my first website, and
I have now developed (still evolving but mature-ish) a quite decent web
framework! I made optimizing compilers for HTML and CSS, and I made a "form
validator compiler" (among other stuff): you specify rules of validation in
any order and it compiles into an optimized tree of closures that computes the
stuff in the right order (well, actually it doesn't figure out the order
itself yet because that's related to graph theory, and I have yet to learn
that).

Could I ever have done so much in Java, or any other mainstream language? HECK
NO! What I love most about Common Lisp is that it gives you 2 more
responsibilties/powers basically. It places you in the seat of the language
designer, and that of the compiler writer. That's my experience anyway. In
Common Lisp, it's so easy to make new syntaxes and semantics that you can
afford to use advanced techniques (ex: compiler writing) regularly and easily.
It lets you deal with the hard stuff, if you're up to the challenge. As has
been said, it's a language in which you think more than you write.

Common Lisp is my only language right now (well, except HTML, CSS, SQL and
whatnot), but I plan to learn Haskell in maybe a year, and then maybe Erlang
or some other cool language.

Also I want to rack up my computing (ex: algorithmic) and math skills, I could
certainly use a more robust footing for the advanced stuff I want to make
(like rule-based systems). I never liked math very much at school, and found
it pretty useless, but now I'm really excited about learning things that will
actually be of use for my work (and for me, work=play=life).

Hum... to go back on topic... well, that guy must have tried really hard not
to find profound insights in lisp to succeed.

~~~
aston
I'll prefix this reply with the fact that I'm a Scheme fan. But I would never
try to code up a large project in anything related to LISP right now.

It's awesome that you've put together your own framework, but at the same time
kind of unfortunate that you have to. Lots of languages (including Java)
already have form validation frameworks that do pretty much anything you want,
but Common LISP doesn't have the community behind webapps to get really great
libraries.

I won't take away anything from LISPy languages as far as learning more about
computer science in general and AI & language design in specific, but it's not
the end-all be all of programming languages, at least not anymore. Ask PG how
many startups he's given YC money to that actually use any language invented
before the 90's...

~~~
bayareaguy
How many YC funded startups actually use any language invented before the 90's
?

------
rglovejoy
The author probably did read Paul's essay, but it looks like most of it went
over his head and flew right out of the window. The comment manvsmachine
cited, "The relationship of C and Unix is unclear to me", just proves that he
is a silly person.

