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Comment by revanx_ | Hacker News Reader

What language did you move to?

That early experience gradually got me motivated enough to learn more powerful tools. These days, Common Lisp (https://github.com/codr4life/cl4l) is my preferred tool for most problems; but I'm gradually learning to like Forth as an embedded DSL (https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo) and might be convinced to write C (https://github.com/codr4life/libc4life) under the right circumstances. I swore early on to never, ever settle for crumbles from the design table again. Then I kept on learning the same lesson over and over again through most languages in common use, until I finally accepted that nothing but simple, powerful, general purpose and free was going to work for me. Mysterious ways, indeed :)

Don't know how to put this... The tech/tools you enumerate give me the impression that your problems are not directly related to (commercial) software development.

If I was ever asked "why are you sitting around on the computer all day instead of going and doing something productive", I'd say that I was gaining exposure and experience. Limiting that exposure means less of a general ability to easily orient yourself when dropped into unfamiliar circumstances or situations.

Driving around randomly uses gas and contributes to maintenance costs, but gives you an irreplaceable spatial idea of your environment that you can't get from scrabbling through a directory, and which you definitely can't absorb from Google Maps or a GPS.

I only grasped these ideas quite recently, and have been rather motivating to get me to learn more about the academic aspects of CompSci.

I'm all for building tools to explore CS. However I believe the question they responded to expected a replacement for what I understand to be a very "pragmatic" development environment.

Why not? They're tools, not fashion items. If you dig a bit deeper you'll find an entire category of people writing software using powerful, mature tools. The reason it's not as commercially feasible is that most problems are not really that difficult any more. And since the software won't break every three months because of moving targets, no one will call for your help once it's in place.

The world is big; you can find a few people doing whichever thing, even if weird. But unlike free software developers, companies are still mostly local (as opposed to remote). That's why I'm guessing you're indulging your intellect with these projects rather than building tools to support commercial software development. To be specific, I'd have a hard time imagining a "difficult problem" for which Forth would be the solution. As for Lisp, I realize Clojure is pretty successful, but my best guess for the reason is the JVM.

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