mattknox

This would be very interesting to me: did you end up putting your ruby hackery up on github?

We use Clojure at twitter and I believe that google supports CL as part of the after-effects of buying ITA. At the time I wrote this, clojure didn't exist and ITA was not particularly well-known.

Note to any potential readers: I was barely a vertebrate when I wrote this (edit: that must have been 6-8 years ago). I did so because I had selected TinyScheme for a project that I was doing at work and a bunch of people who had never heard of scheme or lisp wanted to know why. I briefly got tired of talking about it (which is rather unusual, to those who know me), and wrote this.

I still think that lisp is a great language to learn (although forth is even lighter-weight and about equally powerful), and like clojure a lot for practical work nowadays.

How much elapsed time would make it OK? 6 months? a year? 10 years? Expecting a large company to know where it's going a year in advance and reveal it to outside devs seems unreasonable, even for pure platforms.

technical erratum: if each node in the list adds all the previous nodes as new objects, then with 4 nodes, the total number of objects is 10, not 24, and the overall order of the operation is O(n^2). It's still cool that he is faster, and cooler that it is using an AST, which seems to me like the right solution.

I've been waiting for this release for a looooong time. Bravo!

I'm the dude organizing it at twitter, and yeah, there is leeway. If we get hundreds of applicants, we obviously won't be able to let everyone in. But we'll let in everyone we can reasonably fit.

I'd love to hear the tech case in favor of DRM, but then I'd also love to hear 50 mins of crypto flaws. Sounds like it'll be a great talk either way!

<shameless self promotion> I use goaloc ( http://github.com/mattknox/goaloc ) for rapid prototyping-it allows me to blow smart scaffolds out into rails code, which I then style. Usually, this gives me about the level of functionality I need for clickable prototypes. That said, I often prototype on paper, too.

The correlation of relationships and achievement probably varies from profession to profession. As I understand it, physicists nearly always do their best work before marriage, while businessmen often do theirs after. There are a bunch of related effects that would have to be teased out to make the correlation clean (eg., physicists tend to do their most interesting work very young, and tend not to get married young), but it seems solvable.

One thing I wouldn't rely on in trying to answer this question is asking people whether having a relationship makes them happier/more creative/more productive. Anything related to reproduction is probably viewed in an unrealistically positive light, and probably has a bunch of taboo protection. ( for example, see http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792 for people's reactions to a sociologist who wrote that having children doesn't make people happier. ) It's in our genes' best interests for us to think that having kids is a tremendous joy, whether it is or not, and the same is probably true for relationships.

I'd imagine the research has already been done for whatever field you're in, so you can just look it up.

BTW, as the author I can say this without offending myself: lisp deserves a better article. I wrote this fast, a long time ago. Although I think the equality thing is a really big deal, I have different and better reasons now. (article forthcoming).

Why do you think it's so common? I mean, as a lisp/forth guy I can certainly buy the idea that everyone does a stupid thing for a long time, so I could understand if there wasn't a reason, but surely some kinds of high-level optimization are easier if your code has a tree structure, no?

It might not be a badge of honor, but it is often the best thing to do in the short term. This isn't even new to startups. My grandfather was looking for work in the middle of the Depression, and got a 2-day 'feel-you-out' kind of assignment at a gold mine. So he worked 48 hours at a shot, and got the job.