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Comment by silverlake | Hacker News Reader

A better title: "3 Time Winner of Computer Games Olympiad Wins Yet Another Contest".

Can't believe this Reddit quality comment is getting any upvotes. Google AI Challenge is "Yet Another Contest"? Though you may not be surprised, he is, http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Post-Mortem.html/.

The point is that he won because he's a great programmer, not because he used Lisp.

It's far from clear which way the causality runs.

Well, the 33 lisp entrants don't appear to hold the top 33 spots:

http://ai-contest.com/language_profile.php?lang=Lisp

So more than a fifth of the lisp entries are in the bottom twentyfifth of the competition. So you could also use the contest results to argue that lisp is five times worse for AI than the average language.

(Or, rather, that language alone doesn't guarantee success, but that would be too rational and boring for an online forum).

You'd have to be an idiot to argue that language alone guarantees success. A more common bad argument is say that because this is idiotic it follows that language is irrelevant. That's actually a popular position nowadays.

Just because computers obey the law of excluded middle does not mean we should.

Your math doesn't seem to work.

For that to be true, more than a quarter would have to be in the bottom 25th percentile. (In fact, it still points to lisp being better than average).

Anyway, The bottom 25th percentile of the competition is relegated to submissions that didn't run.

There was a bug (still is, I believe) in the lisp 'starter pack,' which caused the client to crash (It sent garbage to the server or something). So even the default Java starter submission would beat it.

Given the number of people who submitted once and walked away, I wouldn't read too much into it anyway.

The point the guy himself makes is that lisp allows him to be a great programmer.

Of course the program could be rewritten into qbasic. It is getting your ideas and thoughts into a form that is not a compromise to the language which matters.

Yes. Any program can be written in any Turing-complete language, but is far from equally likely to be written in it.

The point is that he won because he's a great programmer, not because he used Lisp.

Given that people have argued that the absence of Lisp winners from such competitions is evidence against Lisp's greatness (I'm going by memory here and don't have time to dredge up the record), it seems relevant to point out when it does happen.

So, essentially:

a) given that people has made bad arguments before b) it "seems relevant" to make bad arguments in the opposite direction now

Huh?

It's relevant because it's a counterexample. Now people can't say, "If Lisp is so good why don't people win these things with it?" They have to say things like this instead:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1961546

Obviously the OP is relevant for other, better reasons than this, but that's what my comment meant.

It would only be a "counterexample" if it was a valid example. This only keeps the "counter" part, but as an example it is flawed.

I think it's worth pointing out that not only is the argument logically incorrect, it's based on incorrect facts. For example:

A: "Lisp sucks. If it didn't, we'd see it winning contests or something"

B: "But it has been used to win a contest. Besides, you're really bad at making an argument"

Wait, what? My original comment got at least one upvote, and then my edit ("For example:..."), that was meant to clarify what I was saying, is getting downvotes. Can someone explain?

I'm not trying to disagree with the OP in general (you can't fight bad logic with more bad logic) but just pointing out that correcting someone's facts can be easier (and with this datum point, possible).

Edit: I like the upvote, but an explanation would be better.

It's the pianist, not the piano. It's the photographer, not the camera. Nonetheless, highly skilled people do care about their tools.

From the article: "Lisp doesn’t get in my way as much as other languages."

His expression of surprise is a reference to the winners post-mortem last round. http://www.a1k0n.net/blah/

I prefer pithy comments, but I can give you a verbose one too. I've used Lisp professionally for 20 years and I'm a huge fan of the language. But if there are lots of brilliant programmers who use other languages to build brilliant systems, how can I claim my favorite language is superior? The language is less important than the programmer. In this case, the winner has proven he's a very good programmer by winning other contests. The fact that he used Lisp merely shows that it is capable of doing the job.

Programming languages are like basketball shoes. You need a minimum feature set to play safely (ankle support, good traction, comfortable arches, etc). But buying a Nike Zoom Kobe will not make you the next Kobe Bryant. So what's the minimum feature set for a good programming language? I don't know. C appears to be good enough, while assembly is not.

To further abuse that analogy, it's more that programming languages are like shoes in general. You can play basketball in cowboy boots, but it's a less than ideal setup.

That said, Kobe Bryant could probably beat me at basketball wearing a pair of cowboy boots. Likewise for programmer skill vs. task vs. language appropriateness.

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