Subject: beating the Avergae

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 May 2001 16:58:49 +0300

To pull this list closer to programming issues:

I read this article 

http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/avg.html

yesterday - it was mentioned on /.,

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/01/1539239&mode=thread

- and I find myself in agreement with it. 

First, I think this article (as well as Eric Raymond's essay quoted
there, as well as Paul Graham;s books) is well worth reading, so I
recommend it to my fellow hackers.

Second, I know lisp (nowhere close to the level of Paul Graham of
course), and I use it in development (for prototyping and stuff). I
would love to program in lisp for a living. Not that I will quit my
current job if anyone mentions lisp in my presence, but I'll certainly
want to know more. Are there lisp jobs in Israel at all?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs."

---

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 18:31:40 +0200

> I was going to type that I agreed wholeheartedly, but decided against
> it. [Wait: I did type it!]. Most things that I have dealt with up to
> now could be written in any general-purpose language. Most modern
> languages have the necessary facilities, including libraries, to do
> all the useful things: communications, numerics, sorting and
> searching, parsing, data structures and algorithms - you name it.
> [Again, I mean applications - I skip Tex and LaTeX for
> text-processing, and things like that, and the cases of projects
> closely related to the OS used - UNIX stuff should better be in
> C.]. There were a few cases in my experience when I implemented the
> same project in different languages, for various reasons. So I am
> asking myself which language I would prefer to use given the choice.
> A lisp-like language will probably be the first in every case, and C++
> pretty low in priority. Does this fit Graham's definition of "power"?

When you say "I prefer Lisp to C++" you don't say anything about the power
of the language. You same some things about your own preferances.

You prefer tail-recursion, dynamic scoping, continuation passing, closures
and whatever.

But its a personal preference, because SmallTalk lovers will say all those
fade before the ease and power of message passing and a nice refactoring
browser.
Dylan lovers would say Dylan is most powerfull because it combines the best
of both worlds.
And my boss just commented that no language can be truly powerful without
direct memory management.

A matter of taste, and there's no point in discussing it.

I'm just saying that trying to devise a scale of powerful languages, having
"what I prefer" as a sole metric, is far from objective, and there for can't
be discussed or argued.

If he want to convince me that Lisp is more "powerful" than C++, he'd better
have a better definition of power.

And saying "those who don't like lisp, are those who don't know lisp" isn't
good enough. Smalltalk lovers who know lisp exist.