My final goodbye to all my good friends and my religion

For many years I have followed the path of destiny set forth from birth to death for every /prog/lodyte. I have studied the holy texts of SICP and stolen PDFs of TAoCP, I have even perused the heretical tomes of HtDP and The Ruby Way. I have spent many a night lying awake pondering the meaning of Satori. But for all of my efforts, I have gained nothing. Or perhaps that is wrong. I have not gained nothing. But the Philosophy rejects the material in favor of enlightenment, and in this I have experienced profound personal growth and deeper understanding of the Art. While I do not mean to say that this is worthless, it is objectively valueless. The world does not crave another infinite stream Fibonacci number generator. The Philosophy will not be advanced by yet another metacircular evaluator implementation. These things have exhausted their novelty. No further progress will be made while such ivory tower pursuits are made towards resolving such archaic problems. In short, the world has moved on.

Some of you will object that they are not obsolete, but timeless. That may indeed be true. I do not begrudge the old guard among us for trying to sustain our culture -- rather, I deeply honor them. But I must ask them to review the blood that has been shed in this losing battle. Our formerly esteemed colleague, Abelson-san, was himself turned on to the empty shallowness of the FOIC crowd, whose leader himself found receiving a copy of SICP to be an insult. Whether his defection was by force or by choice, the fact still stands that our Philosophy was not able to withstand the attacks. How much longer must we withstand this war of attrition? How long must we go hungry while watching the fools beyond the tower grow fat and gluttonous? The high priests will say that our reward lies in Satori. But what evidence is there of Satori? It cannot be touched nor seen. They do not even provide a reason for why it should be pursued, other than for it's own sake. For a while now I have considered the hypocrisy in their insistence on empiricism in all matters other than the axioms of the Philosophy. To even question this is apostasy. The closest validation provided is that all /prog/lodytes were born only to bask in awe of the universes that we create. What arrogance. What decides a man's future, his fate or his own decisions?

I can simply no longer reconcile the heresy that I have long held with my allowance of this movement of perpetual students into my heart. Thus, it is with great sadness that I here announce that I am quiting /prog/ forever (or at least until tomorrow). I am crying as I type this, but there is no turning back. I know that, if I could, I would return to be amongst all of you, my friends, so I took drastic measures to prevent this. Beginning at 8:00:00UTC this morning I have removed all things related to LISP on my system. Even eMacs had to go. In their place, I have installed the tools of the proletariat: PHP, SASS, Adobe Dreamweaver and, CoffeeScript. And to make this irreparable, I have burned my autographed copy of K&R C.

I am still not sure if I am but a wayward spirit who was offered a chance of enlightenment but failed to grasp it, or a human being who has finally awoken from dreams of Elysian fields to carve his own path in the world. I know that you will hate me, but I beg of you to please modernize the dogma so that the spirit of us will live on, even in some form.

Finally, please, friends, and enemies, do not think that I hate you. I love each and every one of you. I have merely grown dissatisfied with the Philosophies. Know that where ever I go and whatever I do, I will always carry a small piece of you all with me in my heart.

--
Signing off for the last time,
Anonymous

And then the room was empty.

ello anonysan. While I do like sicp and things such as lazy streams, I do not insist that these are the only abstractions that should be used. One should be open to all ideas that they may come into contact with. One should have the freedom to adapt to a new scenario in each progressing moment on their path in life. Should a stick be found along the trial, it can be used to write in the dirt, to fashon a spear, or to start a fire. Should a stone be found instead, it may be used to hunt in combination with a sling. You do not know what objects will be found in the trail ahead, nor can you choose a path that will yield one object more than the other. The only thing that you can be sure of is you may find just about anything if you look for it while you walk, and just about anything could be of use.

As I enter the valley of darkness and find myself surrounded by XML parsers that run off of .NET, I remember my training. My lambda spear is still by my side, as I've carried it since the day I've found it. Right next to my C long sword, my bloody seeples chainsaw, my array of assembly throwing knives, the many things I've collected along my journey have stayed by my side as I confront new things, new challenges, new domains to explore. Within each challenge is a new skill to master. A foreign land awaiting exploration. An artifact waiting to be collected and wielded.

When my colleagues are blind in the dark valley, I pull back. I see the buggy XML parser and pull it back to it's mathematical form. My lambda spear emits a faint white glow, just powerful enough to illuminate the shape of the beast. Following the corners, it is rearranged. It's algebra is changed. I apply the endomorphism and permute its elements. The code is broken. Before my colleagues have found their bearings, the beast falls. I recompile. I push forward with the lambda spear and C# sprinkles down. It is a trivial compilation. One doesn't work statement to statement in an imperative language. They solve the problem at its most fundamental level. The light. The guidance of the lambda spear.

My colleagues do not know of the lambda spear. They have no interest in such an artifact and wonder why I carry the relic with me. But they don't question the solutions I propose. They think I posses talent. But I do not. I simply look, listen, and follow the light.

To put it simply, one can apply the lessons of sicp in other languages and contexts. So while you will certainly not get a job writing fibs programs, more concepts carry over to a typical programming job than you might think. While the most demanding part of a typical programming job is to have awareness of many details of APIs, the way the code base works, and what wants what, 5% of the time you may end up solving a difficult problem that requires a creative solution, and this is where sicp comes in.

But if you want to take a break from /prog/ that is cool. Have a good break. My happiness is inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend on a computer. Despite having access to a lot of information, the real world is in general more rewarding for me. So you know where to find us when you'd like to find us again. If this place doesn't exist at that time, googling some /prog/ memes will turn something up. We will exist. We just don't know where.

>>1
Are you serious?

The Tao says:

The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.

If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao.

The highest sounds are hardest to hear.
Going forward is a way to retreat.
Great talent shows itself late in life.
Even a perfect program still has bugs.

It looks like you, >>1-san, have an internal fight that is not completely related with SICP, and to be honest I am not sure if you are in the correct place in the first place...
Is your desire that Lisp be used in the ENTERPRISE? Do you believe that you would be happier if you could program in CL for every commercial project? Are you expecting some recognition by the software industry due to your preference of Lisp instead of Ruby? Finally, did you read SICP and studied the art of functional programming because you wanted to be a rich ``hacker'' living in le ``valley''? if this is the case then, please, never come back: you are not a programmer.

>>6
No bully. The realization that no jobs use academic languages is a harsh one for those first confronted with it.

>>7
Lisp isn't an academic language. Haskell is, but lisp isn't.

>>7

No bully.

Suck my dick, faggot.

The realization that no jobs use academic languages is a harsh one for those first confronted with it.

The realization that no jobs use languages solely used in academia and therefore not in ``jobs'' is a tautological one for those first confronted with it.

>>9
The definition of academic language you are using is a language that is only used in academia, while the definition I was using was a language that is heavily used in academia, and may have some characteristics that make it notable for use in academia, but may also be used else where as well. I would argue that the second definition is more appropriate since a NEET programming in Haskell would make Haskell not an academic language by the first definition.

>>11
Matlab, Java and C are heavily used in academia, and *surprise surprise* also in ``jobs''.

>>12
Matlab and Java are massive gorilla turds, and most universities teach sepples instead of C.

>>13
They're also academic languages as per your own definition.

>>14
This is my first post in this thread and I wasn't the one who gave you the definition for ``academic languages''. That definition is retarded indeed.

>>14
It's discriminatory that the term academic language refers to languages used in academia and never outside of it. You don't see people calling a language an industrial language because it isn't used outside of industry.

If you don't want to accept the definition I proposed then fine. I was misusing the definition of academic to refer to languages that are used in academia but not necessarily in industry, and remarking how it is unfortunate that there are nice languages used in academia that are not used in industry. It is unfortunate that the second definition of the academic language can be used to describe a language, especially if it is a good language. I have communicated my point in more explicit words. Do you understand? Or are you going to nit pick my terms again?

You don't see people calling a language an industrial language because it isn't used outside of industry.

Yes, you do. Have you forgotten about ENTERPRISE QUALITY?

Enterprise frameworks, languages and software.

Enterprise is seen as a positive. And if it is used elsewhere it doesn't become less enterprise from the point of view of the enterprise people. The enterprise people probably aren't even aware of it's use in areas outside the enterprise. But then if a language is used outside of academia it's suddenly no longer academic. I agree that is how the words are used, but I don't think it's fair. Academia ought to be able to be ignorant of industry as well.

The issue is 3rd party things such as libraries and support. Not not the language itself. If only the technical superiority of certain programming languages made them rightfully popular. Maybe the academics should focus more on somehow removing the dependency on libraries and the concept of the library itself.

>>19

somehow removing the dependency on libraries and the concept of the library itself

Could you elaborate? Because at first glance that looks absolutely fucking stupid.

>>20
Satori is beyond your reach, padawa--retard

>>21
Oh, you've learned what the ``Don't bump'' checkbox does! You're one step closer to fitting in. Now all that's left is to stop being a braindead moron. It looks like you've got quite a way to go, however.

>>22
nigger