Scheme vs Common Lisp: war stories

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/41045/scheme-vs-common-lisp-which-characteristics-made-a-difference-in-your-project

by gnosis • 14 years ago

94 29 14 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

anonymous• 14 years ago

And closed. Thank you for playing.

agentq• 14 years ago

-- closed 2011 Nov 28.

dboat• 14 years ago

Rather than close these sorts of "not constructive" but clearly useful questions, it would be a lot better if they created a place for them. Something like knowledge.stackexchange.com, where the utility of public questions and upvoted answers could be applied to more subjective, as well as more advanced topics.

They really limit their own usefulness by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Well looks like the market is wide open for anybody wanting to create a computer programming opinions website.

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

It's called Quora.

finnw• 14 years ago

This is pointed out every time a link to a closed SO/SE question appears on HN (for about three years now.) So why is there still no programming opinions website? Maybe because it's a bad idea.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers. This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites.

Creating a good site for discussion would be quite a bit of work, paramount to creating a different platform. I could perhaps see them expanding to that style of site and reusing the StackExchange brand in the future, but it would essentially be a separate sort of product. For now, it makes the most sense to focus on what they're already great at: Q&A sites.

These sort of questions are much better suited to places like HN and Reddit, although those also have their own problems. (Mostly, discussion tends to be short-lived: almost nobody looks at HN comments a day after they've left the front page, and Reddit isn't all that much better in that regard.)

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

> This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites.

Are they actually ill-suited to this sort of discussion though? Most of the closed discussions like this that I have seen have actually been very good. It seems like they are closing these discussions because the site wasn't designed for it, but not because the site is bad for it.

bunderbunder3• 14 years ago

I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers.

That gets said a lot, but the truth of the matter is that it works just fine for this kind of thing, too. Stellar case in point: The linked article. It even has (or at least had) features which are specifically designed to support this kind of scenario. Remember the Community Wiki feature?

The site is absolutely littered with great resources on topics which a small number of the site's moderators have deemed too subjective to be of value but which the site's users have upvoted into the stratosphere or provided extremely useful, thoughtful answers which other users proceeded to upvote into the stratosphere. Oftentimes they were around since near the site's beginning, enough time to become top Google results which are often linked by blogs, and generally done quite well for themselves - all a testament to how excellent a job Stack Overflow's format does at producing extremely high-quality content on these topics. Only to get closed anyway within the past year or two, in the service of trying to force this bizarre reality-deaf Pronouncement from Above that, regardless of what anyone's actual experience may be, you are mistaken and Stack Overflow can't actually do that.

In summary: If the people who run Stack Overflow were in charge of Apple, there would be a ban on music/podcast player apps on the iPad justified by nothing firmer than condescending lectures about how Steve Jobs prefers audio players that fit in his pocket and has therefore pronounced that the iPad is fundamentally unsuited to the consumption of audio content.

tellarin• 14 years ago

Wouldn't something like Quora cover this area?

It seems the right kind of place to me.

wh-uws• 14 years ago

So I just had an interesting idea I may even pose to meta.stackexchange

Why not have a discussions.#{sub_domain}.stackexchange.com ?

Questions like this one would be moved there and you would need a certain level of karma to participate. Somewhat like HN

Edit: Did it http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/161305/why-not-have-...

_sh• 14 years ago

The accepted answer is an excellent post. In it is this gem:

> Scheme's syntax-case is far more subtle and complicated than any one thing in Lisp.

While syntax-case seems complicated at first because it involves a similar mind-bending to that first time when you learned about lambda, it is my number one power tool that keeps me coming back to scheme (the other being a small 'surface area' that I can keep in my head without having to keep skipping between library documentation and code).

cpdean• 14 years ago

Why are all the interesting questions on programmers.stackexchange.com are closed for being "not constructive"?

freework• 14 years ago

Because the mods set up a bot that automatically closes questions that get over X amount of upvotes.

Or at least thats what it seems...

lumberjack• 14 years ago

Interesting nobody mentioned CLOS. From an outsider perspective of somebody who only used R5RS Scheme, it seems like the one huge difference between Scheme and CL variants.

Scheme vs Common Lisp: war stories

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