kennethtilton

Hey, thanks ruling out the 60s as too old even to consider. :)

I think anyone who is a seat-filler has a problem. But if one codes for fun, if one sees new technology and just DLs a tutorial and starts using it, if one is always thinking about how ones code can be tighter, such that every time one looks at ones code one rewrites it, one will be OK.

No need to stop coding to make money. Top coders do fine, and then one gets to code.

I am consulting for a company where I gave up a top spot so I would have more time to work on my startup: http://tiltontec.com/

I am sixty-two, have been coding head down on hard problems since 1978, on the Apple II.

Good news, grasshopper: it never gets old.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my nap.

<g> Your exercise may be the take-off point.

You sound like you know how to code. Can you talk a little more about how the algorithm you were confronting made the effort of getting a Scheme platform working worthwhile? Understood if the answer is "not that big an effort". :)

Part of my question is that a solid lisp (of any ilk) programmer can program non-lispy languages in a lispy way.

Maybe somewhere in between. The imperfections are so small that even a modest effort would never get undertaken. Something folks need to realize is that Lisp truly is a metalanguage: I think both Graham and Norvig knocked off quick and dirty OOP hacks when that (decent) fad came along. So it is hard to imagine what innovation might come along that would force us to get the Lisp hood up.

Good gosh, no. For example, I am with Einstein: make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. ie, There is a right amount of everything. I guess I am also with Goldilocks, then. I said, "More comfortable", but Americans have nicely demonstrated how in excess that leads to obesity and diabetes. So now we have learned that true comfort comes from a bit more exercise and a lot less garbage food, and now we have come full circle: life is not futile. People ridiculed in the 60s for espousing healthier diet finally got heard and made the world a better place. Did you see the recent news about Coke/Pepsi in decline? Kaching.

My first thought was that the question cannot be answered without knowing what we must fail at inevitably for life to be futile. I looked up futile to be sure:

"incapable of producing any useful result; pointless."

As I feared, it begs the question: what is considered useful?

If it is leaving the world a better (healthier, more peaceful, more ccmfrtable) place than when you found it, no, life is not futile.

If the goal is personal happiness or at least contentment, no, life is not futile, though it certainly feels that way during clinical depression. (Long, dark winters can do that -- look up S.A.D.)

Exactly. We Common Lispers created Clojure as a firewall when we realized The Great Unwashed were headed our way. Seems to be working.

"CL is an abject disaster"? I need a red card over here.

Nonsense. The standards process is a beast, so no one is going to kick it off for anything other than a good solid rethink. As others have noted, the language and spec are done, aka pretty much ideal. Go write some code, people.

ps. Love elsewhere a mention of "modern-style" language development. Sounds like "make it up as we go", what Lisp was doing in the sixties.

...because it was a bad idea. I did some serious work with a Lisp-1 (Arc) and it was a PITA with no discernible win to it.

Thanks, your query led to my belated discovery of http://cs.stanford.edu/jmc

And this: http://library.stanford.edu/collections/john-mccarthy-papers...

Agreed, tho, the links should be salvaged.

ps. Have him take a crack at protein-folding so he does not get bored.

First: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Then, once he is frothing at the mouth: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Then for the love of god protect him from Emacs: http://www.franz.com/downloads/clp/survey

hth

The interesting thing to this old fart as a newcomer to HN is that it really does not make much difference whether or not he is a troll. Unless of course he opens that PayPal account.

What I am fascinated by is the unquestioning support from so many. It speaks to a community with a strong "we're all in this together vibe".

Whether or not the OP is a troll or a psych grad doing research does not change what came after, and what came after to me is the big story here. my2.

Where's the beef? If it is a Web design company, web prefab is an issue because that's their beef. If the company sells something else and the site looks/works great, I would only give them credit for saving time/money/energy by using prefab.

I pulled out of my dive before going broke, but not by much. Licked my wounds, got a job, built up my savings for three years and now can try again, this time much wiser (and less risky) for the experience. Survival is success, I was told early on, and...yep.

Sold or just first serious app? Sold would be Mastermind for the Apple II. Integer Basic. Made a few hundred bucks. Even in 1979 that was not a lot.

It was a long time ago, but I used a golf scoring gadget to keep count of my daily driving excesses. Counting a behavior changes it. The awareness broke the habit. Improvements of course were to the number of points on my license and the safety of all.

A double shot of espresso is great, I have a million ideas all at once and am juiced to do it all. I get absolutely nothing done until it wears off and then I need a nap. hth.

We had someone do amazing work for just a couple of months and it was disappointing to lose him to a start-up but we appreciated the two months of output. But that would be the exception. It can take quite a few months to get up to speed on some code bases, and to learn the non-IT business side if one is new to the sector, so we are loathe to hire anyone with demonstrated startup fever.

You did not include one iota of information about the "awesome new" language, let alone a link to it. If you have that little interest in this alleged language, I do not think the word awesome means what you think it means. But I think it just does not exist.

Oh. They actually want to step up their testing game? So why this thread? <g>

btw, I am glad no one asked the alternative to testing -- it would have been more a textbook on software development. <g>

I hear a lot of talk about agile these days but it all looks like waterfall to me. The development and QA teams need to do whatever it takes to support the business, including dealing with the fact that go-live has magical powers to generate change requests. QA is part of the team, so do what you can to support change right up to the last minute.

Reading between the lines, you should be quite nervous about ending up living in a van down by the river (thank you, Chris Farley, rip) and you should forget completely about taking on the financial responsibility of starting a family.

Your plans B and C require surviving at a job for 2-3 and 5 years, but you wisely (good!) placed "clean up my act" in the conditional position of an IF form. Your sneering characterization of teamwork as "B-league office politics" means we are now in the ELSE branch in which you get terminated for cause two more times in the next six months and cannot defend your resume. You are an untouchable.

Tilton's Law: solve the right problem. Your problem is not finding a way to escape a geographical location, your problem is not being able to work with others. You will have that anywhere.

I recommend yoga, Buddhism, qi gong, meditation -- something, anything that will give you a little perspective, calm down your inner Young Turk, let you see yourself as others see you, and grow up.

hth.

Good question. Even when I take a break I head for a sports bar. Drive time is ... oh, I just quit to concentrate on my startup. Getting older, don't sleep as much. Fifteen?

That's fine. My point was that for you automated testing is a litmus test that turned you against a successful group of great guys. What I do in those situations is check my presuppositions. Maybe I can learn something.

Did you ask them about their practice? Did you ask how often they had to roll back deployments, or at least take a hit on something automated testing would have caught?

OK, I'll stop saying TDD. :)

I am just waiting for someone to ask, "How else can one achieve correctness?" :)

But cults do not do that, they just accuse non-believers, in this case, that they do not care about correctness.

That's like saying Messner and Habeler did not care about safety because they climbed extreme pitches unroped where other pairs roped up and moved one at a time. But M&H were very good climbers and got up and down twice as fast as the others, who doubled their risk of the weather turning on them by being "safe". If you know your mountaineering, the latter is usually how folks die on mountains.

Get over it. They are successful without TDD. It is extremely possible, and then one does not have to slave over a hundred lines of tests when one decides to write ten lines of code. TDD has its place, but it is a relatively small place (and then, yes, it is worth its weight in gold -- I do it often).

Granted I am reading between the lines, but I think the OP was indeed concerned that this great new team he found was not a member of the TDD cult. As i just threaded separately, they equated testing with automated testing, and that set of my cult alarm.

Ha-ha, quote further! "They don't test their code at all (and instead run through tests manually..". Actually, I meant to mention that as another sign of cultdom: the verb "test" now means "automated test". Manually testing does not count, nor do any of the other ways we can get to correctnes without TDD.