Phosphorous, The Popular Lisp [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Phosphorous, The Popular Lisp [pdf]

jfm3.org

41 pointsasciilifeform10 comments

> As pointed out in the extensive literature by Paul Graham [CITATION NEEDED], the often used COND Lisp form is too verbose by two parentheses per case (Θ(2n)^8).

I wish I could wake up to something like this essay every morning.

(Summary: lisp rocks partially because it has not tried to contort to the latestFadsInProgramming. It seems an immediate target of this satire would be Clojure.)

I really like Potion's syntax. It's implementation also borrows some cool stuff from Lua.

I'd like to see a scripting environment with Lisp or Scheme as an underlying implementation for a variety of others. (I need to look at Guile.) I think one language, be it Lisp/Java/Python/Smalltalk uber alles is sadly misguided. Erlang is awesome in its areas of strength. So is Prolog. Haskell was ruling the programming contests for awhile. Rob Pike once spent 6 months developing a concurrency-friendly language that let him write an entire windowing system in one afternoon.

Languages have different strengths. Programmers as a whole would benefit from VMs that run and unify many languages. If those languages also ran on many different VMs with diverse capabilities, this gives us to always leverage the best tool for the job.

The ^8 is a footnote, and a constant factor inside a theta is meaningless.

> At the same time, programmerManagers love Java because everybody else is doing it, which means there's one less thing that can be held against them when their project finally collapses under the crushing weight of their foolish incompetence (original emphasis)

Dear god! It all makes sense now...

Also:

> Two, we will undergo a vigorous ISO standardization effort.

It's really lacking in detail. For instance, are those Dogfish Head IPAs the 60 Minute or 90 Minute kind? Or even 120 Minute? That's the problem with all these "new Lisp" whippersnappers. They spend five years doing Lisp and think they have it all figured out. Once cruel experience forces them to chase down all the seemingly trivial details, like which Dogfish Head IPA they're really talking about, they'll have come full circle back to Common Lisp and be begging shamefacedly for forgiveness on comp.lang.lisp.

"Most modern programmers are smart enough to gure out that there must be something better than Java.". Funny!

The title presents a contradiction in terms, but it's a fantastic paper nonetheless.

Pet peeve: authors who cannot tell the difference between the noun 'phosphorus' and the adjective 'phosphorous'.

(And even use both indifferently. The 'paper' goes downhill from there, but today I only want to shave off a few points.)

"Phosphorus" is Greek for "light bringer."

The Latin equivalent is "Lucifer."

Which is a pretty good summation of how lisp is viewed from the inside and outside of its user community, respectively.

Pretty brilliant.

Hilarious!

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