Quote of the day…

I occasionally run across excellent quotes that I simply have to share:

If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write software in Lisp, you could try telling him it’s XML.

I occasionally run across excellent quotes that I simply have to share:

If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write software in Lisp, you could try telling him it’s XML. -Paul Graham, “Revenge of the Nerds” (a LISP advocacy piece if I’ve ever seen one, that also slams my favorite language, Python, in this case for very good reason)

Almost makes me want to take up LISP…

Oh, and for those few of us into learning about the latest and greatest operating system, here’s another advocacy piece that, I think, is as good a marker as any for the beginning of the end of the Redmond Revolution. When Wal-Mart carries it, prices it cheaper than the alternatives, and is having trouble keeping it in stock due to demand, you know something’s going right.

5 thoughts on “Quote of the day…”

  1. Lithp

    That’s a funny quote but why in the world would you want to write software in Lisp? I haven’t exactly jumped on the .NET bandwagon or anything but I would never go back to anything that isn’t object oriented. I get that its a few layers away from compiled machine language but when I’m charging by the hour, I had damn well better be able to be efficient.

    1. That was the point…

      That’s kind of the point of the guy’s web site. That if you hire programmers who choose languages for their utility, rather than choosing language based upon what’s most common or easy to get a job in, you end up with more competent programmers who can get stuff done faster. His language of choice is Lisp, but he made the point for other less-popular languages (these days, anything other than .NET, C++, or Java).

      You pick the guys that like to code in languages that may not be worth much in the marketplace, but the fact that they know the language indicates they’re probably a person who’s more interested in solving problems with the best tools rather than following the herd.

      Not that I necessarily agree with him, but it’s an interesting point. And Yahoo Store certainly is enormously popular now — and powered by Lisp…

      —
      Matthew P. Barnson

        1. At the time I wrote my comment…

          You’re right, at the time I wrote my comment, Yahoo Store had been primarily running a combination of C++ and Perl for a year and a half. However, Lisp (probably?) still powers at least part of the site. This note discusses it:

          Viaweb at first had two parts: the editor, written in Lisp, which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system, written in C, which handled orders. The first version was mostly Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office manager written mostly in Perl.

          In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor written in C++ and Perl. It’s hard to say whether the program is no longer written in Lisp, though, because to translate this program into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter: the source files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I know, Lisp code. (See Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.)

          Greenspun’s Tenth Rule is:

          “Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

          – Phil Greenspun

          —
          Matthew P. Barnson

  2. You pick the guys that like t

    You pick the guys that like to code in languages that may not be worth much in the marketplace, but the fact that they know the language indicates they’re probably a person who’s more interested in solving problems with the best tools rather than following the herd.

    EDIT by matthew: Removed spammish links.

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