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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

It's strange that nobody in this story seemed interested in studying why the program crashed. If I'm a novice programmer and I do something ambitious like reading a lot of data, and that results in a crash, then I will want to know what particular behaviour is leading to a crash: for example, if I'm using the right functions and not something that becomes pathological when used naively.

Also, from what I can tell, he ran a Lisp system that used virtual memory, which the Scheme system didn't.

It's also incredible that Sussman is reported to suggest shutting down Scheme just because of the problem in this story. And that Sussman himself (coauthor of the legendary SICP book) doesn't seem to bother studying the program.

Nothing in this anecdote makes any sense.

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> It's strange that nobody in this story seemed interested in studying why the program crashed.

You are presuming the terms "never never land" and "just thrashed" refer to a crash, i.e. an abnormal termination. I read them to refer to a program that got bogged down in either unanticipated and extensive computation or abnormally slow I/O. In the context of the story the latter makes perfect sense.

What I suspect is missing from the story is something like Sussman shifting from anticipating a system problem with utilization of system resources to the realization that it was a suboptimal library routine. (That is, a problem with a solution that was the proverbial "simple matter of programming".)

Of course, in hindsight we all have perfect vision...

Yep, I actually misread "thrashed" as "crashed".

That doesn't really change anything, however; his program was acting abnormally, and there is nothing suggesting that anyone tried to attack the problem systematically through a process of elimination and deduction.

There's just not enough information in the anecdote, and (in my opinion) everyone comes out of it looking a bit silly because of the missing pieces.

There is nothing to be learned from this anecdote that sheds any philosophical light on Scheme vs. Lisp, life at MIT, etc. We learn that Scheme has/had a function that one should not use, and that computers used to be really dinky things. So I truly don't know why Greenspun wrote down this anecdote.

His main point is that Common Lisp is better than Scheme when you need to get things done. Scheme may be more elegant, but it's not developed with a focus on practical utility (i.e. no sort function in the standard).

That's one interpretation, but Greenspun never says what happened when he tried to use the correct function; after all, his Scheme program seems to have been complete at one point, which means that rewriting in Lisp was not more "practical" as such.

His point about the Lisp program being smaller is interesting, but still entirely anecdotal: we know nothing about the program, and for all we know, Greenspun was a Scheme novice at the time of the story.

I have a deep dislike for anecdotal "X vs. Y" stories because they don't shed any light on anything; they're just glib, cheap observations that make for a good story (albeit in this case, not that good).

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