Hacker News Reader

Comment by enomar | Hacker News Reader

Plop appears to be part of a Google-summer-of-code project.

I don't think that makes it a Google product/project. It just means Google paid a student to work on an open source project.

That student appears to have written some of that code in Lisp. Why is that interesting?

View on HN

Actually, I work full-time for Google Research (and have written all of the plop code, so far). Google happens to have sponsored a bunch of summer-of-code students through opencog.org, one of whom I supervised, but he coded in C++.

I think that the idea of a Lisp system that learns Lisp programs via probabilistic modeling is intrinsically interesting regardless of who funds it, but that could be personal bias ;->.

I meant no offense. The work does appear to be interesting, but not for the reason indicated in this post's title.

None taken. Thanks!

moshe: by the way, you have the greatest email address ever.

madscience at google com? wow, i second that sentiment

Heh, thanks. moshe at google dot com was already taken, it was my second choice...

if (submission.title.indexOf("lisp")!=-1) submission.voteUp();

surely...

I think you mean:

(if (search "lisp" (submission-title submission)) (incf (submission-score submission)))

Oh dear, I hope axod wouldn't have used IF with a single then-form. That's just asking for trouble. :-)

Are you worried about the return value or something?

No. I'm worried somebody will add another form, without realizing it has the opposite meaning (i.e., else) from the INCF call. Traditionally, if you have only one then-form, you'd use WHEN.

Ah, fair point. I actually made that mistake a couple days ago, in fact.

I think you mean

if(strpos(strtolower($title.$body), 'lisp') !== false) ++$votes;

Oh wait, this is Hacker news. Apologies.

That student appears to have written some of that code in Lisp. Why is that interesting?

Yes, I distrust all language zealots and I avoid them. Committment to a language is a lack of integrity.

Unless you know that language best and deliver the best results in it. I used to always be completely technology-agnostic, until I realized that not everyone has time to learn the best technology for the job (unless your company is filthy rich with talent). A coworker of mine was preaching "you can't just go with what you know" the other day, and I thought to myself, "hold on, that may be good and PC, but if I'm the head developer on this project, and I'm not using anything too exotic, why not, assuming that the app is stable and can be reasonably supported?"

I know that when I work with other developers, I want them to use what they will do best with, because I know that I and others are more than smart enough to make minor changes without breaking the thing. Now, it better be well documented, but that's another matter...

Edit: And dammit, why does this topic title tempt me so much to say "your mom is implemented in Lisp"? That's gotta mean something, and I'll bet it's cold as ice.

Nah, it just means she's been collecting the garbage since the 70's. :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com