Paul Graham says languages he ``cavalierly dismissed'' before he ``even tried writing programs in'' ``have been bad'' and ``just smelled wrong'' because in his brain, they were ``designed for other people to use'', despite the creators of these languages being their biggest promoters. This is the mentality of a mental midget.
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.
It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. But this is something all programmers have to do. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS, Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others. They just smelled wrong.
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Anonymous2017-07-07 3:52
Why did you makw this threqd about tue one and onpy thing pg is actually right about?
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Anonymous2017-07-07 4:13
>>2 Paul Graham assigns a power level to languages, based on how familiar they are to a Lisp programmer. He complains that people cavalierly dismiss Lisp and it's macros, but cavalierly dismisses languages with much more important ideas (that can't be done in macros or translated to C if you want any level of efficiency) because he thinks in Blub. He's a mental midget.
You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.
Lisp teaches you a lot of things. It teaches you to judge languages based solely on their syntax: if it uses nothing but parenthesis, it's a lisp and it's good, if it uses syntax, it's a C-like and it's bad. It teaches you that Perl, C, and Ruby are all the same, because they all have syntax. It teaches you to use Emacs, and furthermore it teaches you that Unix is bad because it thrived where Lisp didn't. It teaches you that the Unix style of doing things is plain wrong and bound to be filled with inconsistencies, an ill of which Lisp is exempt of. It teaches you that you should write your code to run in 100 years, and that therefore you should avoid programming with threads or network sockets. Lisp teaches you to have some historical perspective, and TCP/IP won't be around much longer (I'm saying more than 60 years). Lisp teaches you that the worth of a programmer is not in their skill but in the tools their use.
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Anonymous2017-07-19 23:22
>>8 not really because all of the good lisp stuff was made by skilled programmers
>>8 Paul Graham says that Perl and C are good and that Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, and Visual Basic are bad. He says C++ is bad, and it is, because all C-based languages are bad. Paul Graham is also a fan of Unix and loathes Windows.
He called up his old programming partner from Harvard, Robert Morris, and interested him in the idea of collaborating on their own startup, even though Graham had no clue where they would start or what they would develop; eventually, they decided they would try to write software that would enable a business to generate an online store. Once they were clear about the concept, they had to confront a very large obstacle in their way. In those days, for a program to be popular enough it would have to be written for Windows. As consummate hackers, they loathed everything about Windows and had never bothered to learn how to develop applications for it. They preferred to write in Lisp and have the program run on Unix, the open-source operating system.
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Anonymous2017-07-20 22:29
>>10 genera (and the other lisp operating systems) were pretty nice
>>17 Also, these retards can't be bothered to created a .deb package to do it automatically, so every LITHPer has the joy of installing everything manually instead of clicking on .deb
>>19 Yeah, i bet you enjoy manually resolving package dependencies and patch the headers by hand. The problem is wasting my time on trivial, useless actions that should be automated by design. Typing one-off solutions by hand is not going to teach you anything and its easy to make mistakes.
>>20 Automation makes people very lazy, my friend.
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Anonymous2017-07-22 4:10
>>22 Why aren't you using netcat instead of browser automatically constructing packets for you?
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Anonymous2017-07-22 16:48
>>23 Obviously because you can't always do that, and because it's not trivial.
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Anonymous2017-07-22 18:25
Mental midget madness.
Mental midget middle managers fresh off the street who load me up with finicky end-user requests and wonder why I never get them done, resulting in them thinking I'm incompetent. Yet, they don't realize I've got a backlog of R&D tasks far too advanced for them to understand and the CTO is on an extended vacation for 2 months leaving me with no one to explain to them to fuck off.
Mental midget so-called "C++" programmers who are stuck in the C++98 days and give you a blank stare when you try to explain to them the finer points of pattern matching, multi-dispatch, algebraic types, concepts and the likes and how it can be done with sfinae/enable_if/decltype/deduction guides/etc. They then fuck up your code and take it in a completely opposite direction of what you had originally intended, shitting all over it with Java-esque OOPs turds, tons of sloppy whitespace and redundant gradeschool comments.
Example: // dereference the value here and pass it to the lambda, duhhhhh task(*value)
// get a Data future from the service, just making sure you know that because I think everyone is as retarded as me hurrr std::future<Data> data = service->RequestData();
Don't get me started on the mental midget QA testers.
Civilization is going down the drain. If only we had a means of filtering out the noise. It's a shame the mental midget MBAs are over hyping AI again, thus guaranteeing a second AI Winter is only beyond the precipice.
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Anonymous2017-07-22 18:32
>>25 At least Lisp won't suffer when the bubble bursts this time. Then again, the first winter already did so much damage that there simply isn't much to ruin any more.
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Anonymous2017-07-22 18:52
>>26 The AI Winter was divine retribution for pro-UNIX Lispers polluting the world's computers with C, UNIX and POSIX.
Stallman started the project on his own and describes: "As an operating system developer, I had the right skills for this job. So even though I could not take success for granted, I realized that I was elected to do the job. I chose to make the system compatible with Unix so that it would be portable, and so that Unix users could easily switch to it."[33]
In 1986, Tower assisted Richard Stallman with Stallman's initial plan to base the C compiler for the GNU Project on a Pastel compiler Stallman had obtained from Lawrence Livermore Lab.[9] Tower worked on rewriting the existing code from Pastel, a variation of Pascal, into C[1] while Stallman worked on building the new C front end. Stallman dropped that plan when he discovered the Livermore compiler required too much memory, concluding, "I would have to write a new compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front end that I had written."[9] Stallman released his new GNU C compiler March 22, 1987,[10] acknowledging others' contributions, including Tower's, who "wrote parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description" based on ideas contributed by Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser.[2][11]