The LISP defender

This is me. A CS major about to graduate. (´・ω・｀)

I go to the worst possible school in america. MIT.

The kids here are just brogrammers and webdevs, and dumb idiot girls who dress like sluts have neon colored hair and can't even code, and are all really mean bullies.

The thing is I always have my Dijkstra book with me everyday in all of my classes. I have decent grades and I love reading papers from the greats like Knuth, Dijsktra, McCarthy, Sussman, Steele, The list just goes on and on.

The kids at my school mostly read horribble blogs like Ragenwald (2.0) beta, Coding Horror, r/programming, all of thaht. My favorite blogs the top 3 are: lambda the ultimate, olegs kiselyovs homepage, and the codeless code.

One day this idiotic and slutty girls comes up to me and asks what I'm reading.

"OMG!!! Like what are you reading to!!!LOL"

"Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60" I say.

"OMG!!1!! You read OLDDD Stuff. THATS OUTDATED AND FAGGY LIKE FORTRAN! NODE.JS AND ARE BETTER!!!"

"like fortran??"

"OMG LIKE EVERYBODY!!! HE READS SPECIFICATIONS FROM THE 60s!!!! WAT A FAG"

Everyone procede to look at me.

"AHAHAHA!! GET OUT OF HERE AND TAKE YOUR STUPID MANUAL"

I turn to walk away and try not to cry...

and then it wells up inside me.. I turn around I just fucking say it:

"Look here you dumb slut. Don't you ever say that ALGOL 60 is for fags or outdated. ALGOL is legendary. They created BNF what everyone uses to specify syntax. The entire compiler was bootstrapped by hand compiling the implementation after the wrote it. node.js is for fags. ALGOL influenced scheme and so many other structured languages it's a legend. So just remember this: ITS NOT FOR FAGS!! GOT IT!!!!"

I then proceede to walk out singing my favorite song "The eternal flame/God wrote in lisp code - julia ecklar" out loud.

The girl starts to cry.

I am now know as "The LISP defender" cause of that day. Know everyone learns to never fuck with me and my programming texts. And to this day I am glad I stood up to this girl. Keep structured programming alive, don't let it die out.

how do i upvote you

People can be like that, at my old school some guy talked shit to me because I was a Lisp fan.

At my new school some people are angry at me for being ugly nerd rather than a metrosexual, most can barely learn java, and then there is this guy who is like "who would ever use a linked list?". What the fuck. Although I'm sure I'm pretty stupid too, in other ways.

A lot of people are trolls, especially lots of professors, it's all about pride and ego and pain and competition and righteousness. In a sense, everyone in this world is a troll to some degree.

>>1
hipster

I mean, people can be remarkably elaborate trolls, almost every social situation is like that. It's quite an elaborate game but it seems to be zero-sum in a sense. Are people ever actually nice? Rarely, unless it is a facade to manipulate you.

Persuasive people are just trying to manipulate you into doing something that doesn't benefit you, sometimes even, it is something they went to great pains to do themselves before realizing it was a waste of energy. They want to manipulate you into suffering the same pain and waste as they did.

At least, this is the way with teenagers and also adult overgrown douchebags. Full-grown adults I find are not so bad trolls most of the time, if they are well-balanced, although a few are pretty fucked up. A lot of older people I have met seemed genuinely nice and not trying to compete and fuck you over, although maybe it was just an illusion.

I go to the worst possible school in america. MIT.
The kids here are just brogrammers and webdevs

What the fuck, is this some failed attempt at trolling?

Sounds like you negged that girl hard OP. She'll be gagging for some ALGOL the next time you see her.

>>7
nigger

>>7
Nope, pozzed her. She'll get the fuck flu in a couple of weeks and go tell her family that she got HIV off a toilet seat, hahahahahahah.

Lisp isn't structured programming. It's very structureless. Moreover Scheme is not a Lisp, but you are right that it is an Algol. Erik Naggum wrote a good piece on this subject.

>>10
Bad post, so stupid. Fuck Eric Naggum, whoever the fuck that is, he can suck my anus. Scheme is the most Lispy of Lisps.

>>10
why the FUCK is Scheme not a LISP?

Because it has a single namespace for values and procedures? LISP should've had it too. God you piss me off.

>>10
Dead shitposter's opinion doesn't mean shit.
;_;

Thought this would be about the arcade classic Defender, written in Lisp.

Disappointed. -1.

>>14
So make it yourself, dolt. Disappointment is opportunity in disguise.

>>12
Here's my rationale: If Scheme were a lisp, it would call itself a
Lisp. Does Java call itself a C? No, because it's not a C.

Moreover, if scheme were a lisp, then ML would be a lisp. As would
dylan, logo, perl, ruby, and lots of other languages which have
closures and recusive functions. ML and scheme are far more similar to
each other than either is to Common Lisp.

Scheme is not a Lisp IMO because of two types of reasons: first,
technical, which have been argued on this group ad nauseam (the
deepest difference there to me is that a scheme program is defined as
a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence
of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot
of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an
infix member of the Algol language family.); but more important,
philosophically. The Scheme community has evolved a set of values at
odds with the spirit of Lisp: the goal for simplicity at the expense
of convenience (compare the concept of CL's $item designators with the
design of convert stuff explicitly like Scheme's exact->inexact), the
goal of only giving basic blocks and letting you assemble stuff
yourself (call/cc isn't a replacement for a worked out exception
system).

To sum it up with a Ritchie quote: "Some languages were meant to get
work done, some were meant to prove a point." I put Lisp in the first
category and Scheme and ML in the second. (See also the reliance on
tail call elimination to be able to prove the point that a looping
construct isn't necessary.)

>>17
this is so dismissive of good design

any time you see "real world", "get things done", "but in practice", "wont scale", etc. etc. it's just shitters defending shit with shit non-arguments because there are no really good arguments against well designed languages.

I wonder why these simpletons are not capable of understanding simpler languages? or is it just that they have really bad taste.

>>17
ML was meant to get work done, by creating a theorem prover. The LCF language was meant to prove a point.

>>18

there are no really good arguments against well designed languages.

Only if they argue against a strawman language based on their own lack of knowledge about the real one.

the deepest difference there to me is that a scheme program is defined as a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an infix member of the Algol language family

Yeah this was what I was refering to. Scheme is an Algol, not a Lisp. It also explaisn why you can't e.g. port Macsyma or Reduce to Scheme without significant effort, but you can port it to any real Lisp quite easily.

>>18

there are no really good arguments against well designed languages.

The definition of ``well designed'' is subjective and arbitrary. The codemonkey's definition of ``well designed'' is one that lets her do what she wants, when she wants, how she wants, rather than worrying about how it will look in a year. She needs things that can be done as quickly as possible, without worrying about shit that will only rarely go wrong. She needs a language that doesn't try to tell her what to do.

What makes your definition any more valid than hers?

this is so dismissive of good religion

any time you see "flat earth", "the six million", "but jesus is a jew", "risen from the dead", etc. etc. it's just shitters defending shit with shit non-arguments because there are no really good arguments against muslims.

I wonder why these simpletons are not capable of understanding simpler religions? or is it just that they have really bad taste.

>>23
Jesus is a kike though.

>>22

more valid than hers
hers

I think you've answered your own question.

I was a lisper until I discovered machine learning.
I don't care about the language I'm writing in anymore, my ultimate goal is to devise a general learning algorithm (think scaled up reinforcement learning a-la deepmind) then train it to display interesting competencies.
An example of competency is generating programs from dubious natural language specifications.
Imagine programmer-instances, engineer-instances, mathematician-instances, all trained on their own different curricula by the same algorithm.

We have reached the endgame, guys. Replacement of human specialists with appropriately trained DL models running on cheap cloud instances will happen in 1-2 decades.
It's already happening.

>>26
I don't believe that until we have automated natural language translation and comprehension that goes far beyond Google's translate service i.e. we have a machine that passes the Turing test and doesn't require a gimmick such as pretending to be an 8 year old foreigner.

>>26
Good luck getting a convoluted regression algorithm to ``display interesting competencies''

>>26
so you really believe this is practical?

like with a big enough data set you can just magically generate correct programs from a specification without any thinking, just matching patterns against patterns seen before?

don't let the 'learning' in machine learning confuse you, it's just curve fitting, finding a matrix that minimizes some vector, numerical optimization like that.

there's no abstraction or planning in that so there's no way it will ever be able to produce interesting programs. you need to involve automatic theorem proving if you want a computer to generate correct programs.

Summary: sure, machine learning works great for things like training the heuristic function of a chess engine but it will never be able to come up with the idea of alpha-beta pruning.