Revenge of the Nerds

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

20 28 17 years ago

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

It's a great piece, this little gem is the reason why I posted it:

"If you start a startup, don't design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don't, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were."

at about 2/3rd into the essay.

aditya2• 17 years ago

The trouble with that, of course, is that even though tipjoy pleased users they just didn't have enough of them or enough transaction volume since the market wasn't ready.

What does one do in that case? Keep going (bleeding money) or give up? Lots of startup ideas are so bold that they're clearly early for their time.

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

I think tipjoys major problem was simply not being integrated in the platforms they were targeting, not that they did not please their users enough. You have to go through all the gates to score, not a subset of them.

And not having enough users is just as much a reason for failure as having dissatisfied ones.

The market is ready alright, it's just that as a third party add on offering a payment service you have to cross one more hurdle.

I'm pretty sure if the tipjoy principle would be implemented from within the network that it would be an instant smash hit.

asimjalis• 17 years ago

Is this an attempt to earn some quick karma?

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

I don't think I'm in the need of that. You can have all of it, it wouldn't make any difference to me. Let's trade uids, my email is in the profile.

aditya2• 17 years ago

Wait, you can do that? Exchange uids?! I want nickb's... :-)

Oops. My bad. Pre-edit: "so why post this and why now? :)"

padmapper• 17 years ago

I highly recommend PG's book of essays Hackers and Painters (it contains this essay).

TweedHeads3• 17 years ago

(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

def foo(n): lambda i: n += i

Give me two powerful languages with the same features and I'll pick the latter for its syntax.

So no, lisp may be the best right now, but it won't be the best forever, its syntax is its best friend and worst enemy.

Something lispers will never understand. Love is blindness.

pg3• 17 years ago

In this case it's more that ignorance is blindness. That syntax is a feature. The fact that Lisp code is expressed in Lisp data structures makes it easy to write programs that write programs.

wheels2• 17 years ago

Even not as a real lisp guy that's one of the things that I appreciate about lisp and the only time that I've done anything particularly powerful with it: the fact that it's basically a parse tree makes it really interesting for genetic programming.

TweedHeads3• 17 years ago

Dear Paul, when I say its syntax is its best friend, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Now, say I fork lisp and change one little thing:

(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

to this:

[defun foo [n] [lambda [i] [incf n i]]]

or even this:

{defun foo {n} {lambda {i} {incf n i}}}

or how about this?

Hmm, trees are powerful, no matter how they are expressed huh?

What if we can represent the same trees using colons and commas as delimiters?

:defun foo:n, :lambda:i, :incf n i.

Maybe spice it up a bit using periods as recursive closing delimiter.

See? still powerful trees!

Between common lisp and colon lisp, I still use the latter.

Love is blindness.

abecedarius• 17 years ago

That Python code shouldn't work. It needs a 'return', assignments aren't expressions, and assigning to a nonlocal variable in the absence of a declaration just creates a local. (Might be nice if Python did look more like that, though!)

gruseom4• 17 years ago

You're assuming your conclusion: that the languages are equivalent in power and differ only in syntax. If that were true, then sure, one would simply make an arbitrary choice based on taste. But it isn't true. It's profoundly untrue.

The syntax in that first example you quote isn't arbitrary. It's essentially the only notation that exists for representing the structure of a program explicitly in language. Is that valuable? Uh, yeah. It's incredibly valuable. It's worth a lot more than syntax in many cases.

By contrast, the syntax in the second example is arbitrary: the delimiters and operators could just as easily be organized differently. Perhaps this particular organization makes certain programs clearer, but it loses the ability to represent programs in general.

If that doesn't make sense, think of the fairy tale of the goose that lays golden eggs. Everybody's obsessed with their particular golden egg. Lisp - precisely because of the difference visible in those two examples - is the goose.

There's nothing in this that PG didn't already express in his comment. But what you wrote deserves more than one protest :)

billswift• 17 years ago

I'm not much of a programmer yet, and a lot of the C bashing I read complains about pointers and how necessary they are in C, yet according to this:

"Dynamic typing. In Lisp, all variables are effectively pointers. Values are what have types, not variables, and assigning or binding variables means copying pointers, not what they point to."

They are even more fundamental to LISP. Also if dynamic typing is good and most posts seem to claim it is, and dynamic typing more or less equals pointers which is what this seems to be saying, doesn't that mean using pointers is good? Also, I have seen frequent complaints about C's "static typing", but if using pointers results in dynamic typing, doesn't that suggest that static or dynamic typing is a stylistic choice in C programming?

pg3• 17 years ago

Pointers in Lisp are implicit. Lisp uses pointers only in the sense that loops use gotos.

Revenge of the Nerds

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