Bill Clementson's Blog: Lisp is for Entrepreneurs - Part 2 (Amazon)

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060304.html

by cstejerean • 19 years ago

37 20 19 years ago

bc.tech.coop

pfedor• 19 years ago

Yeah, I also like Stevey's blogs.

But, as the quoted article exemplifies, he is about as passionate about programming languages as he is about text editors. He will write one blog article about Lisp and Erlang and how they would give you competitive advantage, and then another article about how Emacs makes you more productive than any other editor, and how using IDEs is for lesser programmers.

Now, I'm not sure about programming languages. But the part about text editors is plain ridiculous. There are great hackers who use vi (Paul Graham) and there are great hackers who swear by Microsoft's IDEs (John Carmack). How many lines of code do you write per day? 100? 200? 500? No matter how great a coder you are, the biggest bottleneck is the speed of thinking, not the speed of typing. I would even say learning touch-typing is an overkill, as far as writing code is concerned.

So that's the reason I'm not taking Stevey's rants exactly seriously. Tomorrow he may decide that eating the right kind of cereals for breakfast is necessary for achieving greatness, and you bet he will be able to make a case for it as convincing as he does for Ruby and Emacs. He is a very exceptional blogger, no question of that.

brianr• 19 years ago

the biggest bottleneck is the speed of thinking, not the speed of typing.

I agree, but I've had experiences where I get a glimpse of the solution in my mind and I struggle to get it down fast enough, afraid that I might lose it before I get it all down somewhere. In situations like those, I'm very much grateful for touch-typing, autocomplete, and terse languages.

Goladus2• 19 years ago

Your working environment influences your thinking. You don't have to be typing all the time for a poor editor to interfere with your ability to get things done. Try coding for 3 months exclusively in notepad and see how much productivity you lose. (Or note what other tools you wind up using to make up for the deficiency)

The information you have visible on the screen and easily accessible in a keypress or two is also critical to thinking quickly and efficiently. Yegge once mentioned that he had the perl documentation as emacs .info pages, meaning it probably takes him a few seconds to find a number of frequently used resources. That means he'll probably be better at leveraging standard functions than someone who uses Google. I find the split-screen function in emacs far superior than trying to have multiple windows windows open and arranged on the screen.

One way that emacs is superior to Visual Studio is the keyboard macro facility. I frequently find that I need to make some minor correction that needs to be repeated a few times. Either it's too small a change to be worth refactoring completely using language abstractions or a clunky macro system like MS word, or too complicated to be suitable for copy/paste or find/replace. In a lesser editor, you build up a subconscious resistance to making small corrections like that, so even though you may not be typing furiously all the time, the weaknesses of the editor still affect the way you think and the solutions you're willing to use.

start macro(C-[), search to semicolon(C-s, ;), kill to end of line(C-k), move to beginning of the line(C-a), yank killbuffer(C-y), move to beginning of line(C-a), move down, end macro(C-]).

This is a quick macro that moves everything after the semicolon to the beginning of the line, and can be repeated for consecutive lines as often as necessary. Suppose you had a section of code that looked like this:

      do_thing(x, y, x); do_other_thing(a, b, c);
      to_the_death(j, k, l); to_the_pain(wfb);
      do_thing(c, f, e); do_other_thing(t, t, q);
      #etc for maybe a dozen lines.

Suppose you need to swap the position of the functions on each line, such that "do_other_thing" comes before "do_thing" and "to_the_pain" comes before "to_the_death."

Without a keyboard macro facility like the one in emacs, you're stuck jumping around using copy-paste. It will probably take a few minutes, and when you're done you'll have probably lost your train of thought. So even though it may have had a small effect on the lines of code you produced within a given 5-10 minute period, it may significantly affect the trajectory of the entire session. After you get used to emacs, using a macro like this is as easy as typing a line of code.

Visual Studio has its advantages. It has a terrific runtime debugger, for example, and is great for visualizing data structures. But it's worth talking about, and Yegge has some great insights.

aston4• 19 years ago

Your example is sort of self-defeating insofar as who would ever type code that looked like

      do_thing(x, y, x); do_other_thing(a, b, c);
      to_the_death(j, k, l); to_the_pain(wfb);
      do_thing(c, f, e); do_other_thing(t, t, q);
      #etc for maybe a dozen lines.

? And what IDE wouldn't make that pretty from the get go? And why would you have more than one instance of something like two functions needing positions switched when that could've been refactored out? Very artificial example, and even still doesn't demonstrate the strength of Emacs over somethink like Visual Studio.

cstejerean4• 19 years ago

PG uses vi? For Lisp? Has he gone mad?

Well, on second thought this makes sense if he's programming in Arc and Scheme these days since Slime wouldnt help much.

In theory I agree with you about editors. One tends to do more thinking than typing, but you need an editor that gets out of your way. I think the same applies to touch typing. Once I get into a state of flow I don't want to have any distractions. For now emacs isn't helping since I still need to lookup certain functionality. But it definitely looks promising.

cellis2• 19 years ago

Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest. - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr

I think people considering the switch to a new lang need to read No Silver Bullet, from those considering COBOL to those considering Rails or CL.

calambrac• 19 years ago

At the risk of misinterpreting what you're getting at: the lesson to take from NSB is not "Don't switch languages" or "Switching languages is ineffective".

The lesson is: "Software development is inherently difficult; don't expect that to change just because you switch to a better language."

Brooks readily embraces and promotes the idea that better languages are vitally important, to strip away complexity that isn't strictly necessary for the already sufficiently complex task of building large software systems.

cellis2• 19 years ago

Very well put.

aston4• 19 years ago

This article makes an argument for having smart people, not for coding in Lisp. There's no indication that they couldn't've written something similarly powerful in some other language, only that they chose not to.

cstejerean4• 19 years ago

I agree. But it makes me wonder, why did the "smart" developers choose Lisp and not something else?

aston4• 19 years ago

Well, in the article, the smart developers actually chose C, too. And all of Google's smart developers are choosing C++ and Python. 37 Signals' smart developers are choosing Ruby. Ad infinitum...

We really need to get away from arguing for the goodness of languages based on the success of the people using them.

brlewis• 19 years ago

This is a very relevant question. People don't explore it enough.

A related question is, why was PG afraid that Viaweb's competitors would find out about Lisp and start using it? If smart people did well regardless of language, would that fear make any sense at all?

mjstumpf• 19 years ago

I have never commented on an entry on news sites before, and that is the 100% truth. I felt compelled enough to do so now.

That blog entry is the largest load of arrogant, self-indulgent crap I have ever seen coalesced into one place. Either he is doing a piss-poor tribute to the "Bastard Operator from Hell" writings that were common a few years ago.. or he is genuine and the epitome of people I strive to avoid in this industry.

One of the things I like about the web space is that, by and large, I don't have to deal with people like him. They're usually trapped in the lower levels of firmware, device drivers, and OS kernels by choice, because they've hit a sweet spot, built fortresses and refuse to retrain themselves.

cstejerean4• 19 years ago

the lower levels? He's not arguing for coding in assembly, but Lisp - THE high level language. Unfortunately it takes some (myself included) several years to realize that.

downer• 19 years ago

I have heard the claim, fifth-hand, that Yahoo rewrote Stores in C++ in order to get it to scale.

I know that when Google acquires start-ups, the rewrite for scaling commences... so it seems at least somewhat plausible.

Bill Clementson's Blog: Lisp is for Entrepreneurs - Part 2 (Amazon)

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