"torve" <···········@gmail.com> writes:
> while reading the canonical Lisp-family success stories again and again
> in all the well known places (naughty dog, the yahoo shop,
> the-not-yet-so-canonical bayesian spam filter), I'd like to know what
> failures (small and large) people have experienced or know of while and
> after deciding on Lisp as an implementation language. Excluded from the
> question are failures based on unwillingness to properly indent code
> ("couldn't get used to the silly parens") or ignorance of FFI ("there
> are no libraries"). Do you have encountered serious problems that made
> you abandon a project or wish to have chosen a different language
> (anything, Perl, Haskell, C++)?
For the purposes of this post, (eql Lisp ANSI-Common-Lisp) => t.
Some background. I grew up around computers and both my parents were
programmers. I've written lots of toy programs in Basic, Fortran,
Pascal, C, C++, Perl, and Java. I've never single handedly written
anything of non-trivial size.
After some period of mucking about doing other things after high
school and some college, I finally decided to take up a career as a
programmer starting with C++. At first this worked well for me. But
over time, my various employers wanted me to do things that were not
at all fun. This got worse when the Internet got popular and web
applications became the only game in town.
This state of afairs was mind numbingly dull to me and my mind started
to wonder about side projects I might do. The nice thing about a side
project is that it is mine and I can use any language I want and one
of my jobs had someone who had introduced me to Lisp. It sounded like
the perfect language.
It took me a while to get into Lisp. I've posted about this before,
so I won't repeat it here. As I became familiar with Lisp, some bad
things started to happen and there were some disappointments.
Chief among the bad things was that I started to have utter contempt
for all the programming languages I had prior experience with. At
this point, I think only Lisp and assembler interest me. Perl is
still cool, but the syntax is now just so ugly that Perl's power is
subsumed by the ugliness. C is also still cool, but it is really just
a high level assembler and why not go directly to the machine?
As for the disappointments, there are several. I have not gained
proficiency in killing werewolves. I am still not a super star
programmer. Hot chicks are not crawling all over me and Jessica Alba
has no idea that I exist. I have not made millions single handedly
creating the world's killer whizzbang app just by wishing it into
existence. In that, Lisp has totally failed me.
Lisp may be the most powerful general purpose programming language
ever devised. But I still have to think hard and work hard to write
anything cool.
--
http://www.david-steuber.com/
The UnBlog | A hole in the Internet layer.
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David Steuber <·····@david-steuber.com> writes:
> Hot chicks are not crawling all over me and Jessica Alba
> has no idea that I exist.
This is a serious shortcoming, but considering that Jessica was only 3
years old when CLtL 1 was printed....