From: Espen Vestre
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <m1k5eumc6l.fsf@gazonk.vestre.net>
Francogrex <······@grex.org> writes:

> It's been 2 weeks today that they've been mucking around in X and
> haven't found anything that comes close to what I wrote in lisp...
> meanwhile we're losing time and money. This is very frustrating to
> me and remind me of the article Paul Graham wrote about Lisp and how
> it is not accepted by some.

I'd have a chat with the boss and ask him if he still thinks it was a
good idea to do it in X instead of lisp. If your boss and your
colleagues are unable to learn something from this, I'd be tempted to
go looking for a new job...
-- 
  (espen)

From: Pascal Costanza
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <6ftticFddm30U2@mid.individual.net>
Espen Vestre wrote:
> Francogrex <······@grex.org> writes:
> 
>> It's been 2 weeks today that they've been mucking around in X and
>> haven't found anything that comes close to what I wrote in lisp...
>> meanwhile we're losing time and money. This is very frustrating to
>> me and remind me of the article Paul Graham wrote about Lisp and how
>> it is not accepted by some.
> 
> I'd have a chat with the boss and ask him if he still thinks it was a
> good idea to do it in X instead of lisp. If your boss and your
> colleagues are unable to learn something from this, I'd be tempted to
> go looking for a new job...

I wouldn't suggest to do this. Going into another discussion with them 
is asking them to admit that they were wrong. It's unlikely that they 
will admit that.

Instead, next time you see another opportunity, do the same thing again: 
Solve it in Lisp in a short amount of time, and show them the solution. 
They may again insist to do this in X again, but after a couple of 
iterations, they may notice a pattern, and maybe there is a chance that 
they will give in at some stage...


Pascal

-- 
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
From: Espen Vestre
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <m1bq06lyhf.fsf@gazonk.vestre.net>
Pascal Costanza <··@p-cos.net> writes:

>> I'd have a chat with the boss and ask him if he still thinks it was a
>> good idea to do it in X instead of lisp. If your boss and your
>> colleagues are unable to learn something from this, I'd be tempted to
>> go looking for a new job...
>
> I wouldn't suggest to do this. Going into another discussion with them
> is asking them to admit that they were wrong. It's unlikely that they
> will admit that.

Sorry, my description made it seem a little blunt - I was by no means
thinking of another heated discussion, and I was not thinking
confronting the whole group. I just thought it could be wise to have
an informal chat under four eyes with the boss. Whether that's really
wise, depends on the relationship with the boss, of course.

> Instead, next time you see another opportunity, do the same thing
> again: Solve it in Lisp in a short amount of time, and show them the
> solution. They may again insist to do this in X again, but after a
> couple of iterations, they may notice a pattern, and maybe there is a
> chance that they will give in at some stage...

It all depends if it's worth the work, and that's impossible for us as
outsiders to tell. The OP said the company was losing money because of
this, if they keep on losing money because of bad decisions, switching
to better developing tools may not be enough to salvage them, and
switching to a better company may be the best solution for the OP.
-- 
  (espen)
From: Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <rem-2008aug11-001@yahoo.com>
Francogrex <······@grex.org> writes:
> It's been 2 weeks today that they've been mucking around in X and
> haven't found anything that comes close to what I wrote in lisp...
> meanwhile we're losing time and money. This is very frustrating to
> me and remind me of the article Paul Graham wrote about Lisp and how
> it is not accepted by some.

My advice: Encapsulate your Lisp solution as a CGI application
which takes a service request in public-key signed-and-encrypted
form and returns its result set in public-key signed-and-encrypted
form. Install all your Lisp stuff in that way on your own personal
computer. Then write a simple remote-call utility in the horrible X
language that opens a HTTP stream to your personal computer and
makes a service request. Unless your boss actually looks at the
code, he'll think you did what he asked you to do, of writing the
service routine directly within that horrible X language.

If you ever lose your job, you disable access to your service
handler and their big application suddenly stops working. Make them
*suffer* for not allowing you to use Lisp on *their* computer!!

Why the public-key encryption and signature both? Both directions
must be encrypted because you don't want third parties to discover
your company's confidential data going back and forth over the net.
Requests must be signed because you don't want your server
preforming free work for anybody except your company's computers.
Result sets must be signed because the main application needs to be
able to trust that it's getting the response from the correct
server rather than from some imposter that might feed in faulty
results from time to time. But you knew all that already and I
didn't have to explain it, right? (Newbies: Feel free to read my
detailed explanation of "why" without feeling like a Dummy.
Everyone is a newbie the first time they study a new (for them)
technology.)

But why use a public key system? Read the WikiPedia article on that
topic. (Even newbies should know that already!!)
From: Tamas K Papp
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <6gd954Ffamk3U2@mid.individual.net>
On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:29:10 -0700, Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
wrote:

> If you ever lose your job, you disable access to your service handler
> and their big application suddenly stops working. Make them *suffer* for
> not allowing you to use Lisp on *their* computer!!

That will certainly be a big consolation when they sue you.

Tamas
From: Thomas A. Russ
Subject: Re: Lisp at work
Date: 
Message-ID: <ymiy731dgt7.fsf@blackcat.isi.edu>
Tamas K Papp <······@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:29:10 -0700, Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> wrote:
> 
> > If you ever lose your job, you disable access to your service handler
> > and their big application suddenly stops working. Make them *suffer* for
> > not allowing you to use Lisp on *their* computer!!
> 
> That will certainly be a big consolation when they sue you.

Previous posts indicate that might not be a considering for him.  His
assets seem to be sufficiently small, thus rendering him "judgement
proof".


-- 
Thomas A. Russ,  USC/Information Sciences Institute