The Bipolar Lisp Programmer | Hacker News Reader

The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

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38 pointsmuriithi32 comments

I used to attend meetings of a Lisp / FP users' group. Man, what a lineup of the brilliant unaccomplished. There were maybe one or two guys who were using Common Lisp at their jobs (one was at Amazon) and getting amazing stuff done with it. You could spot these guys immediately by their energy and social comfort. But the rest were always working on something cool and never finishing it. They were so far gone nodding in their opium parlor of thought there seemed little hope. I couldn't interest them in any practical project. They were only interested in the next high.

I used to think 'publish or perish' was a bad thing for academia. Now I don't. Everyone needs external social pressure.

Story of my life. Started CS in the age of 13 flunked out after 2 years. Been in & out of universities (mainly CS & philosophy) ever since, attracted to the ideal, disgusted by reality. All my life I abandoned most projects that took more than a a few weeks, but did some very cool things in these short time spans. But I think I found the cure, at least for me, a project that is superbly compelling... Suddenly my highs were longer and the lows not so low, and I have been finally been able to apply myself to a single project for a long time, over a year now. I think you need to find a project that will captivate you like the Everest captivated Sir Edmund Hilary, a monumental challenge in a field that interests you. Mine is developing a new machine learning algorithm.

"you need to find a project that will captivate you like the Everest captivated Sir Edmund Hilary, a monumental challenge in a field that interests you"

Quoted for truth. Plus with a big enough problem, there will always be neighboring issues you can look at when you get bored of the sub-sub-problem that you are focusing on at the moment.

I don't disagree with his portrayal of the brilliant failure, or even with the statement that such a person would be attracted to Lisp. But brilliant successes and brilliant failures both seem to be attracted to it, which implies that the brilliance is responsible for the attraction, not brilliant failure specifically.

He's even further off when he says that the reason Lisp isn't more popular is because of the mysterious quality that attracts such people. It's unpopular for more mundane reasons: the syntax looks odd, and there's no good, standard implementation with lots of libraries.

"...there's no good, standard implementation with lots of libraries."

I think his point was that there's no good, standard implementation with lots of libraries because many of the people drawn to Lisp have big ideas but are bad at finishing things.

The problem is that the main dialects of Lisp (CL and Scheme) date from the era when languages were specs. Now they're implementations. It just happens that no one has released a good new Lisp dialect in that sense of language. But no one (as far as I know) has released a good new Fortran in that sense either.

Language designers who have what it takes are quite rare: Matz, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall. It just happens none of them chose to create a Lisp dialect. But the problem is not the brilliant failures who are drawn to Lisp, but that e.g. Matz wasn't (quite).

Are you saying that if someone releases a good new Lisp dialect, then it will become popular?

I think you're right about those mundane reasons, but the community can be a major turnoff too. Try posting a stupid question[0] on comp.lang.lisp - you'll almost certainly get flamed, and maybe get harmful responses[1]. Try the same on comp.lang.ruby or comp.lang.python and you might get some gentle correction, but not outright hostility.

[0] A stupid question would be anything you can find out by searching google, reading the manual or possibly digging through a few thousand lines of source code.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4c95766a8b...

Example [1] was just an individual nutter. It gets used over and over to show that Lisp newsgroups are mean. One sign they're not is that people have to keep re-using that one example instead of finding the new ones that should in theory be very common. From what I've seen, people on Lisp newsgroups are much like on any other.

I just went looking for recent examples to prove my point and found none. Perhaps my memory of CLL is inaccurate, or it has become more friendly recently.

Comment I posted in reddit when this article turned up a year back.

"And here we are rushing to put in a mee too comment. I have known this about me for sometime. I had this thing about people. What ever you admit, you admit it because you are proud of it. Like for eg. I am always busy - yeah, you are proud of being busy. Or to bring the point out, one of my friends admitted to me that he suddenly realised that he was arrogant ( a BBM himself ), subconsciously he is proud of being arrogant.

My simple question: Does it have to be like this ? I mean, being Brilliant and a failure. C'mon guys, failure sucks. Big time. If you don't feel that, you don't have a problem. But if you do, consider this. Lets turn this inside itself in the true spirit of Lisp. Being BBMs we can come up with brilliant solutions to 'cope up with brilliance' while avoiding failure. Can't we ? Stop being proud. That's the point where it Starts. Post any coping mechanisms you have discovered over the years as reply to this thread. Thanx."

This is a SciAm article about praising kids for intelligence vs. praising for hard work:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655

Net result: kids praised for their intelligence tend to look for things that are easy or to appear smart. Challenges and mistakes often de-motiviate these kids. "Smart"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude where intelligence is a fixed, natural attribute and being able to accomplish something easily is a sign of natural intelligence. "Growth"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude that intelligence can grow and that challenges and mistakes are opportunities to learn. These kids tend to relish challenges, often getting even more excited over difficult problems.

I think that sums up LISP and C with regards to the brilliantly unaccomplished.

Being able to trivially do something in LISP that is difficult in C is good ... yet for someone who relishes a challenge, what does that mean to find a really hard problem in LISP that is nearly impossible in C?

Does anyone have a link to the thread from the last time this article was posted on news.yc? I tried a few google searches, but it seems that the link depth is too far back and it isn't indexed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012

(Hack, the only way to search YC at YC I know of: try to google for the old link and submit it to YC again, and it will detect the duplicate and lead you to the thread )

http://www.kirubakaran.com/phr0zen/

(Front page snapshots from Sep 29, 2007. (wouldn't have helped you in this case))

Yes that hits pretty close to home I must say... Here comes the depressive cycle again, LOL!

I feel as if this article was written about me.

Me too (and everyone else, it seems), but I wonder how much of this is Forer Effect. If you go through his description point by point, you'll see that each thing is something that people like to think of themselves, or tend to notice in themselves, but not in other people.

I never thought that being bipolar meant living through, frenetic herculean work cycles with copious amounts of output followed by long periods of inactivity. That describes me to a T, though.

I never thought I was bipolar.

This reads like my life story. I actually went a little further - I came close to failing my undergrad degree because I was bored and partying too much, then I put in a ton of effort at the last minute - enough that one of my lecturers offered me the opportunity to do a PhD under him... then I started thinking about the futility of it all again, and slacked-off the first couple of years of the PhD!

Fortunately, the extreme ups-and-downs seem to be lessening as I get older.

This article feels like it was written about me as well!

It amplifies your power and enables you to embark on projects beyond the scope of lesser languages like C.

Like Unix?

Oops. Bullshit detected.

You're missing the point. It amplifies the power of a single individual to do something ON THEIR OWN beyond what they could accomplish with something like C. Last time I checked UNIX wasn't written by ONE person.

wasn't written by ONE person.

LOL. Two.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and his "point" is pointless. One person, two people, N people are meaningless distinctions. Besides, most Lisp projects that have any real success are group efforts as well, I'm sure. The REAL point is always the same: What are those projects? Where are they? How successful are they, really? I'll point it out as often as this article gets re-posted: When you compare C/C++ with Lisp based upon the only thing that matters, results, then Lisp is a near-complete failure. The applications that really matter, that people really use, that have real performance, that solve real problems, are written in C/C++/Blub, or some scripting language.

I actually make almost daily use of a social news site that's written in a Lisp dialect. The guy who wrote it had a prior success with Lisp. If you're interested email me and I'll send you the link.

Okay, Yet-another-digg-clone versus http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

...and that list is woefully abbreviated.

Suppose we are traveling through a forest and come to a ravine. The drop is thousands of feet; so far away that we can't see who might have fallen to their death while attempting to cross. There are two bridges. One is a jumbled together mass of rotting boards and vines, the other is made of solid stone. We know that 500 people have crossed the rotting wooden bridge successfully, and know of only four who have crossed the stone bridge.

Which bridge do you think we should take?

Not exactly sure what you mean but my answer is:

Neither before also knowing how many people attempted to cross each bridge, so I know the success ratio for each.

Ah, so you're ready to change the argument to counting applications. Nobody's arguing that the count of Lisp applications is high. I'd only argue that the success stories are out there.

I see what you've done there.

Operating systems, the sort you're talking about, are fairly small. Students write them as one-semester projects.

it turns out that a lot of USEFUL projects require a group of people to complete. And when large groups of people work together for a long time they can write anything in C++ (if you have the time and resources you can always start by reimplementing Lisp).

But if i want to hack something together for my own purposes I dont have the time to do it in C.

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