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Comment by kingkongrevenge | Hacker News Reader

This guy is possibly the worst writer I have ever read. I do not understand why his material keeps getting circulated.

I read them because I find them entertaining, and I can even relate to a lot of the sentiments. A written piece labeled under the heading "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" is not intended to be a carefully crafted treatise. A drunken blog rant is a drunken blog rant. I do not understand why people think that a drunken blog rant has to follow a format that isn't at all representative of a drunken blog rant. It's funny. If the problem is that it's not funny to you, then that's a valid viewpoint, and I can respect that.

A drunken blog rant is a drunken blog rant.

Cheers to that.

I don't read a lot of stuff on the web top-to-bottom, especially opinion pieces, but I found this article exceptionally entertaining.

I'm curious as to how you define "worst." As someone who once upon a time studied English, I love this paragraph:

It's hard, though. It's a big jump. It's not sufficient to learn how to write C-like programs in Lisp. That's pointless. C and Lisp stand at opposite ends of the spectrum; they're each great at what the other one sucks at.

That's good writing. Summarizes the writer's opinion in an active voice without latinate verbs or excessively long sentences.

There are two entire sentences there that could be thrown out without any change in meaning.

Short sentences and they're there for emphasis. I think it's in Strunk & White that they say "what do you do when you've shrunk your language so small that there's nothing left" - repetition! Say everything 3 times!

There's interesting content, even if you don't like his writing aesthetically.

A restaurant review has more content than this. This is just a list of personal tastes, with virtually no addressable argument. A lot of what he does say is idiotic. His entire lisp section, for example, is about an elisp system, which has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of learning real lisp. "Perl OO never really caught on." Um, have you looked at CPAN or the core module APIs in the last 8 years?

Perl OO never really caught on because it isn't part of the core language. It's the same with Scheme. It's nothing to be embarrassed about or something that you want to try and correct.

Also, what pray tell is a "real" lisp? Last I checked, Emacs-Lisp has macros and much of what makes any lisp a "real" lisp.

> Perl OO never really caught on because it isn't part of the core language.

What?

Perl OO did catch on, and it is part of the core language.

Perl OO = library. Scheme OO = library. Library != language. The last time I tried to use Perl OO, CPAN had to download a bunch of stuff for Moose. That doesn't sound like it's part of the core language to me.

Has the situation changed? Are there OO things included with the default dist of Perl?

Actually in lisp (and scheme as scheme is a dialect of lisp), the line between library and language is so fuzzy that its practically invisible.

Perl 5 has had OO forever. Here's how it works:

  package Class;
  sub new { my $class = shift; bless {} => $class }
  sub method { my $self = shift; $self->{attribute} = 'value' };

  package Subclass;
  our @ISA = qw(Class);
  sub method { my $self = shift; $self->SUPER::method(...); ... }

   package main;
   my $class = Subclass->new;
   $class->method;

This is built into the core.

Keep in mind that the article is like 4 years old.

So we should be impressed that it can spell? :)

It's not a very strong example of his writing, either.

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