Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhiggins | Hacker News Reader

You know, a lot of non-academic languages are pretty crappy... like Ruby, or PHP. But I'm not impressed with languages out of academia either. I don't care about your -morphisms or fancy type systems...

View on HN

You know, creationism and demon possession are both quite crappy. But I'm not impressed with biology out of academia either. I don't care about your evolution or fancy germ theory...

Your argument is so compelling. Now I see how wrong I've been. I'll just accept everything the ivory tower says from now on, on any topic, unconditionally. Brilliant.

Reminds me of something I read on http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4217 :

Appeal to Lack of Authority

Authority has a reputation for being corrupt and inflexible, and this stereotype has been leveraged by some who assert that their own lack of authority somehow makes them a better authority.

Starling might say of the 9/11 attacks: "Every reputable structural engineer understands how fire caused the Twin Towers to collapse."

Bombo can reply: "I'm not an expert in engineering or anything, I'm just a regular guy asking questions."

Starling: "We should listen to what the people who know what they're talking about have to say."

Bombo: "Someone needs to stand up to these experts."

The idea that not knowing what you're talking about somehow makes you heroic or more reliable is incorrect. More likely, your lack of expertise simply makes you wrong.

> The idea that not knowing what you're talking about somehow makes you heroic or more reliable is incorrect

That's a really good definition of anti-intellectualism. It's easy to sneer at academic languages (and easy to hate them, just observe a college frosh/soph struggling through Scheme or Haskell), but things we now take for granted e.g., garbage collection, virtual machines, IDEs, object orientation, templates/generics were all (even recently) considered academic.

the only struggle with scheme is with falling asleep

maybe next year, if you keep up the good work, you'll be reading about Appeal to Some Website.

If you've taken the time to learn Lisp and it hasn't impressed you even a little bit, you're made of more stubborn stuff than most programmers.

But most of the "non-academic" languages wind up cribbing from the academic languages anyway. For example, Python is very much a Working Man's language, but it pervasively uses not only garbage collection (from Lisp), but also list comprehensions borrowed directly from Haskell!

I'm impressed with lambda calculus as a mathematical formalisms and its equivalence with TMs, and I am impressed but not overly enamored with homoiconicity & metaprogramming/macros. I like conditionals. Not a fan of marketing minimal syntax but having special forms. Not a fan of cons as a a building block for everything. Not a big believer in garbage collection. And certainly not a believer that Lisp is a practical programming language for much of anything these days.

But don't let me stop you from caaaaadring away!

> Not a big believer in garbage collection.

This makes me seriously wonder whether you're trolling. Out of purest and most innocent curiosity, what sort of programming do you do?

I am mostly doing programming in languages with GC, which in this case is fine because it's OK for it to go, you know, kind of slow.

Often, manual allocation is even slower.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2552

No no, he's an expert programmer that can do repetitive tasks better than a computer.

With only three times as much memory, it runs on average 17% slower than explicit memory management. However, with only twice as much memory, garbage collection degrades performance by nearly 70%. When physical memory is scarce, paging causes garbage collection to run an order of magnitude slower than explicit memory management.

I don't see how this article is helping your point; that's a pretty massive hit. Even worse, this is a GC-style program modified to use explicit malloc/free. Programming with manual memory management encourages a very different style of programming where you try to use malloc/free as little as possible, and you try keep memory for various things in contiguous chunks of memory.

EDIT:

This comment is interesting: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2552#comment-38915

I think it's the discussion that we're meant to read, not just the OP. Most of the comments are pointing out questionable assumptions in the study (e.g. even though they admit that actually changing the program to use manual memory management would be nearly intractable, they assume that essentially running an AOT garbage collector is equivalent).

They may have had Appel's "Garbage Collection Can Be Faster Than Stack Allocation" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.8...) in mind.

Also, the technique described in that comment (forking processes with finite lifetimes, allocating but not freeing, terminating and letting the OS clean up all at once) is also what Erlang does, and it seems to work pretty well in practice. Each process has its own arena, for allocation purposes.

I disagree. It's true that a lot of programming language research is impractical in the real world, but occasionally it produces gems. I'd rather have the gems than nothing at all.

The real danger is not the languages, but their proponents. Academia can't make you use Haskell, but other people can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com