[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Plus, Lisp loses on size of community and size of standard libraries. How the @[EMAIL PROTECTED] am i supposed to convince myself to spend 3 years learning all the goodies of Lisp then?
The Lisp community also has some interesting ... features: See: "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer" http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm One of the passages which resonates the strongest with me: (BBM stands for Brilliant Bipolar Mind)
One of these is the inability to finish things off properly. The phrase 'throw-away design' is absolutely made for the BBM and it comes from the Lisp community. Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp (Garnet had just gone West then). No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something. Now in contrast, the C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you're liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you're liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere. And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one) in the not unlikely event that he will, at some time, go down without being rebootable.
By the way, this criticism is not unique to Lisp--it holds for most of the programming community. It just seems to run strongest in Lispniks.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
