Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991) | Hacker News Reader

Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)

dreamsongs.com

120 pointssimonpure21 comments

http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/speaker/Richard+P.+Gabriel

Biography: Richard P. Gabriel

Dr Richard P. “Dick” Gabriel is a leader in the Lisp/OOP community, known for his book “Innovation Happens Elsewhere”, his essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”, and the "Gabriel” Lisp benchmarks that became a standard way of benchmarking Lisp implementations. Dr Gabriel is also the recipient of the recipient of Association for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award, and the 2004 Allen Newell Award.

With a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 1998, Dr Gabriel was described in the Alan Newell Award as stretching “the imagination of computer scientists with ideas and innovations from other fields” and he combines these into presentations to technology audiences that he describes as being “audacious set-piece guerilla performances”.

Dick has been a researcher at Stanford University, company president and Chief Technical Officer at Lucid, Inc., vice president of development at ParcPlace-Digitalk, a management consultant for several startups and Sun Microsystems, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Presentation: I Throw Itching Powder at Tulips

http://gotocon.com/berlin-2013/presentation/I%20Throw%20Itch...

http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-berlin-2013/slides/RichardP.Gabri...

https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/15/the-rise-of-worse-is-bet...

In 2000 an OOPSLA panel was convened to debate the question of whether worse was still better. Gabriel wrote a position paper arguing for the-right-thing. A month later, he wrote a second position paper arguing for worse-is-better!

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper....

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ProWorseIsBetterPosition.pd...

A bit from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628170

There's more on the Worse Is Better side: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Yes indeed, I really like this almost twenty year old article. It seems like I re-read it every several years.

Lisp is in even better shape now than twenty years ago:

Application delivery is a solved problem. On the commercial side LispWorks and Franz have portable UI frameworks and application delivery mechanisms that are excellent.

On the open source side, SBCL and Clozure are excellent, with different strength. Both have robust application deployment capabilities.

In the non-Common Lisp world, Racket (Scheme) just keeps getting better, and also has a good application delivery mechanism and portable UI that looks great in macOS and not so good on Linux.

I don't consider it in better shape, given that only us the old timers are properly aware of LispWorks and Franz, and a large majority think SBCL is the only survivor left.

> Yes indeed, I really like this almost twenty year old article.

Heads up, this was written in 1991 and we have 2020 now!

Yikes! You are correct. Thanks for the correction, even though it makes me feel even older: I have been using Common Lisp professionally since about 1982, a few more years makes that 40 years, using the same language.

> Clozure

Clojure

Clojure isn't a Common Lisp implementation, it's a different Lisp dialect with an emphasis on immutable data and interacting with host systems like the Java VM.

This is Clozure: https://ccl.clozure.com/

I used Clojure for a few years on two jobs, but in this context I did intend Clozure Common Lisp.

I also wrote a small side project in Clojure about ten years ago http://cookingspace.com/ that I used to track nutrients as percentage of daily requirement in my recipes.

Today I learned!

No, Clozure is correct. OP is referring to Clozure CL, not Rich Hickey's Clojure.

Haven’t read it but remembered this paper being mentioned in Guy Steele’s fabulous “Growing a language” talk [0].

I don’t want to give anything away about the talk (which is one of my absolute favorites), but Steele says about the title of this paper: “... the truth is that Dick Gabriel knew how to choose words with punch“

0: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0

It's Battle of the Manifestos day on HN! Compare and contrast this with "Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585258

Shitposting and its consequences have been a disaster for Intenet discourse.

Your point would be more plausible if you weren't responding to someone who's been "shitposting" on the internet (your "Intenet") for over 30 years and whose "shitposting" has been highly educational for generations of people, including me — especially HCI researchers, of course.

Nobody is above the law.

The "law" you are proposing is a bad one, based on either faulty observations or a value system so out of keeping with my own that it might as well belong to the Ayatollah Khamenei.

Since my post hasn't broken any laws, and I haven't murdered anyone, or sent any bombs in the mail, let's give phlakaton the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith, that he's not making baseless accusations, and by "shitposting" he's referring to the actual convicted murderer Ted Kaczynski, who posted bombs in the mail that killed 3 people and injured 23 people.

Unless he can cite any criminal codes I've violated or people I've murdered, I'll assume phlakaton is not just being histrionic and totally overreacting by calling my post "a disaster for Intenet (sic) discourse", or accusing me of murder.

Speaking of melodramatic shitposting about network based disasters and the triumph of Worse is Better, from the Unix-Haters handbook which included a chapter on Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big:

The X-Windows Disaster:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

From The Unix Haters Handbook:

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

>The Rise of Worse Is Better, By Richard P. Gabriel. p. 311.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook

>Contents

>The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in computer science terms, and they were tremendously frustrated by the "worse is better" design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.

Sir, I refer of course to the law of social discourse that most of us adhere to which says you don't bring Kaczynski completely out of left field to a HN discussion and not get called out for your foolishness. No matter your assumed eminence in the community. You are neither half as amusing nor clever in this moment as you think you are.

Give it a rest.

Citations, please. I don't remember that particular law. Can you give me a link to it, please? Is there a Wikipedia article on it? Is it this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_climbing_the_Reic...

I didn't post the Unibomber manifesto. Quite the contrary: I was dismayed that Ted Kazinsky's manifesto was beating out Richard Gabriel's manifesto, so I pointed it out to dang, the HN moderator, who flagged it and knocked it off of the front page.

Did you report it too, or did you [quavering melodramatic Dudley Do-Right voice] just sit by silently and say nothing while evil was being perpetrated?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q83Jqd2h0Yg

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