incepted

> Type-tagging was obviously inspired by DNA

Source?

> It is also not a coincidence that Erlang is pure-functional - so is the world of proteins and enzimes.

That world is mostly driven by mutations, which are the exact opposite of functional purity.

I really have no idea where you get all these broken metaphors.

> The difference is as it is between craftsmen (who are artists) and assembly-line workers.

It's a bit harsh to call Lisp programmers assembly-line workers. I think the language has value and pioneered some language concepts that we find across a lot of languages today, but Lisp is very dated by 21st century standards.

The Lisp version is less verbose because it's dynamically typed (in other words, it's less verbose because it contains less information that would allow this code to be proven correct).

By the way, these days, we write things like

    val l = ArrayList<String>()

If verbosity is your number one criterion to write your code, just skip all error checking and your code will become super concise.

> RepetitiveStupidityFactory myStupidityFactory = new RepetiriveStupidityFactory;

Yeah because

    (let v (make-instance 'RepetitiveStupidFactory))

is so obviously superior, right?

> For them PHP or Java are tools for getting shit done.

... as opposed to Lisp?

You're doing some major revisionism with this post and claiming a lot of completely unsubstantiated (and in my opinion, completely made up) facts.

I don't think Gosling, Stallman or Armstrong ever mentioned any basis in genetic science to justify their language. And seriously, think about it... It's completely absurd.

I'm also not sure why you think that returning error codes is "too good for mediocrity to grasp", because in the 21st century, it's considered a very bad practice that leads to extremely unsafe coding practices, which is one of the many reasons why it's been deprecated in most modern languages invented in this century (except Go ;-)).

> If LISP is such an EPIC language why are there no major pushes from LISP community,

The main reason is that the LISP community is just not paying attention to the modern world.

Back in its days, LISP was revolutionary and ahead of its time. It gathered a bunch of followers who could reasonably be justified in thinking their language of choice had something unique about it.

And then, they made a major mistake: they stopped paying attention.

The tech world moved on and passed them. And they ignored it, confident that nothing new or interesting could ever be invented after Lisp.

It's the ultimate hubris: thinking that programming language science can ever reach an end.

It goes both ways. Lisp has certain attributes that also make modern programmers go "Yeah, back then it sounded like a good idea".

Being dynamically typed comes to mind.

Don't underestimate the network effort. Maybe that recruiter you just connected with won't find you something interesting but they will share your resume with their colleagues. Present and future. And these colleagues will look for things on your behalf. And so on.

Job hunting can be a life changing moment. Something that will, literally, affect the rest of your life. If only because salary increases compound over an entire lifetime of working.

In other words, a $10k increase in salary might not seem much but it will add up, and not only will raises compound as well but future jobs will start at a higher negotiation level as well.

Of course, spend your time wisely but I think it's really short sighted to think "I'm happy at my job, I am going to completely block out all the recruiters out there".

The best time to interview is precisely when you're happy with your job.

You have zero pressure, you can practice interviewing, network and you can make extravagant requirements. If it doesn't work out, no big deal, you like where you are. But if it does, your career can make quantum leaps.

> On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer.

You say this as if it's a good thing, it's not. It's a bad thing on Windows. It means the software will not be able to use a lot of facilities on the Windows platform. It's also a hassle for users who need to pick up a target directory, remember it's there, create a shortcut manually, etc...

There are reasons why modern operating systems use installers

As for the article, it is incredibly dated and wrong on many fronts about how people ship software on Windows.

I'll just address one point:

> Unfortunately is not a very flexible way to package anything into a single compiled executable. It is hard to ship an update - since you have to redeploy the executable anytime your program changes.

Installing and updating executables on Windows is a solved problem. Solved. It's so easy to deploy patches and even have software self update that nobody thinks about it any more. The fact that Pharo is reinventing its own process under the cover of doing it better (which they don't, it's worse by all standards) is precisely the problem that I was referring to: Pharo (and Smalltalk people in general) still don't understand how to deploy software on modern computers.

Not always, but how distracting is it really?

Obviously, everyone will be different but I get 2-3 emails from recruiters on LinkedIn per week. Managing them takes me about one minute per week.

Compared to the number of times where I ended up on a phone call or having lunch/coffee with a CTO, VP of Eng, architect or senior engineer, it's totally worth it to me.

My suggestion: don't cut out that option until it really becomes unmanageable. Chances are you'll find it's worth the occasional disturbance.

> I have not suffered in any way

You don't really know that, maybe you missed out on interesting jobs and you'll never know.

At the very least, receiving recruiter emails from LinkedIn allows me to do networking and meet a lot of influential people at various companies, even if I don't end up landing a job there. It also builds my recruiter network, which is never a bad thing: if I ever need a job one day, I am planning to spam my entire network of recruiter, let them know exactly what I'm looking for and let them do the work for me. It goes both ways.

I respect deciding to opt out of LinkedIn but there is an opportunity cost to such a decision that you seem to have overlooked.

I'm surprised that decades after the first Smalltalks came out, the Smalltalk people still have not understood how big a deal that is.

Exactly.

It died for technical reasons because .net supports reified generics, which made it pretty much unable to support Scala's type system.

People who keep saying that erased generics is a stupid idea have no idea what they're talking about.

scala-native is facing insurmountable difficulties, the kind that will certainly not be conquered by a single student who will stop working on it as soon as he graduates.

> In Scala every major release addresses one or two pain points and migration is very smooth – no "rewrite all your stuff".

Yes, the Java way. Take ten years to implement basic stuff.

I much prefer Swift and C#'s approach to this: first major version bump, things get deprecated. Second bump, they get removed. It worked great for C#, it's going to work great for Swift, which has already seen incredible adoption on iOS.

Scala is moving at a glacial pace in comparison, really not worth bothering with.

There was also a Scala.net project that was abandoned and died.

That's very common for academic projects.

Be fair now, you don't need to write them, you just copy/paste them.

> Swift where things get added at a frightening rate.

Things are always added at a frightening rate when a language is young. Happened for C#, happened for Scala, happens for all languages.

Not really something to worry about.

Agreed. I see the statement "It's being developed at EPFL by one engineer" as a very high risk that once this student graduates or moves on to a different university, the project will be abandoned and die.

> This "let someone else do the work, get it from a gem" mindset is what kills long lived projects

If you replace "gem" with "library", this actually makes a lot of sense. It saves time to reuse existing (high quality) software.

Plenty of ecosystems do just fine with this mindset, starting with the JVM and .net.

The problem is specifically Ruby and the gems system.

> It seems like a very early proof of concept.

Agreed, it looks like a rushed response to TensorFlow.

> I'm continually amazed at people's attempts to reinvent text layout in the browser.

Agreed.

I don't recommend you try to read pg's essays, they will make you very angry.

As a father of three toddlers, I can tell you that sitting in an airplane for hours is pure heaven for concentration and lack of distractions.

> Show me how to thwart this.

Nobody is forcing you to drive.

> Something that I'm surprised this page doesn't talk about, and which is very important considering the recent hubbub over left-pad, is that any dependency you get on Cargo can be relied upon to continue to exist forever

Maybe the reason why it's hardly talked about is because it's common sense and pretty much all dependency managers support it?

Except node of course, because they have no idea what they're doing.

None of these updates are mandatory. You don't have to upgrade anything if you don't want to.

Yes it is, but his number was an exaggeration in the first place.

There are hundreds of millions of phones running Java today, what does that tell you?

Yes, they all run Java.

What's your point?