Inaimathi

Just to clarify; I am not in fact Steve Yegge (though I've been told I have a similar writing style), just a young lisper who read his essays.

Heh.

The traditional snippet associated with that argument is the Game of Life in APL. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

And yes, this is specifically why I opted to redefine "power" in my post; the standard definition leaves out some points that I've found to be essential.

I could see this in the extremes (a one-of data-munging script has no maintainability requirement, for example), but accepting the weights as completely subjective seems dangerously close to saying "All languages are equally powerful, and it's just a matter of preference", which I disagree with because it would invalidate the Blub Paradox.

It may be the case that the weights are affected by individual tastes and requirements, but the construction of the language (and therefore some inherent property of the language, rather than of the user or of the situation) would almost certainly affect those weights as well.

That's the argument I fundamentally disagree with.

It may be true for things like SQL (or PS or the many, many DSLs out there), but general-purpose programming languages are implicitly (perhaps tautologically) supposed to be good for the general case.

It goes without saying that if your list of requirements includes something like "our deployment environment will have 16 kb of memory and an 8 mhz processor and no network interaction", you don't want to use something like Erlang. But except for such extremes (which I probably should have explicitly stated I'm not thinking about), it is possible (and necessary) to distinguish between two languages on the basis of power.

I probably should have just linked to http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html instead of writing anything, because the "Blub Paradox" section makes the above argument much more eloquently.

This is true, and I don't have extensive enough experience to weigh those correctly (and even if I did, I would be heavily biased by the languages I currently use). This is why I opted to wuss out rather than risk getting it horribly wrong.

And yes, from what I've seen/heard, plenty of Rubyists, Lispers, Haskelliens, etc. would certainly disagree with you.

Sorry about the confusion.

"Omega" was a reference to the Seibel talk I quote from, in which he casually postulates Omega as the most powerful language that might be built for current architectures.

I haven't had a chance to play with it seriously yet, but I went over a "getting started" tutorial a while back. forth-mode is installed and ready on Emacs in case I get some spare time; it's on my to-do list along with some more serious Python, Clojure, Scala and Smalltalk experimentation.

Agreed, except with the "they aren't looking back" part. If that were true, Lisk and Liskell wouldn't exist (and people wouldn't be wondering aloud "How can I get pattern matching-definitions or point free style in Lisp?")

The conclusion of the article was more or less that you can't get a perfect combination of the two, and that any unification that might emerge will have to make decisions about which features to cherry-pick.

I'm also not clear on what you mean by "they started at more or less the same point".

That's exactly what I meant. The CL version has options, the Scheme version just takes a format string (which has fewer possible directives than its CL counterpart), which makes it less flexible and slightly more verbose.

To be fair, it's not exactly a straightforward paragraph, and I was talking about two different functions both named "format", so I can see how it might have been confusing.

The other points about the web server (which Jay ended up focusing on more) are really side issues; my biggest gripe was that lack of iteration during the development phase. If I could change code on the fly, I'd be a happy camper.

A while ago I noticed that I was suddenly doing more coding in SBCL than PLT Scheme. When I thought about it, I realized that Steve Yegge said the same thing a long time ago and I remember reacting with dismissal. The post wasn't about Yegge, it was about the idea (which I've heard elsewhere too, he just happened to be the one I remembered at the time) that Scheme is the "better language" while being paradoxically less "useful" than Common Lisp.

In defense of the lame title, I tend to write in order to get things out of my head. Had I known that someone would post that article on Reddit and Hacker News, leading to Jay McCarthy dropping by and asking what, specifically, was wrong with his server, I might have proofread it more than 0 times before posting it anywhere.