Not used to Sussman's lecturing style - is it called "teaching by example"? - I found him very tiring to listen to; he spoke very fast but told very little, since he used most of his words to go in detail through a number of almost identical examples One of the oldest examples is presented by the LISP 1.5 Manual: halfway their description of the programming language LISP, its authors give up and from then onwards try to complement their incomplete language definition by an equally incomplete sketch of a specific implementation. Needless to say, I have not been able to learn LISP from that booklet!
>>1 its authors give up and from then onwards try to complement their incomplete language definition by an equally incomplete sketch of a specific implementation.
Behold a typical Java programmer. Show her a complete language implementation in two pages of code and she just wouldn't believe you, like, who are you trying to fool with this bullshit, if you had a 900-page spec and 1Mb of source then she would look more carefully, but you are not even trying!
>>2
I remember an interesting history:
Many years ago, a new company got responsible for maintaining the Sao Paulo metro routing, and when they presented their version of the system, one of the metro's managers told: “There's something wrong, this program is running too fast! The older system always took about ten minutes of processing. Let the computer work some more.”
People just added a sleep secretly, and then, in the next day, the manager aknowledged their work: “Hmmm, now we're dealing with a robust system. Good work!”
>>8
Sorry to disappoint you, but modern Lisp implementations are quite fast. On average 1-4 times slower than C, depending on how much you want to overoptimize.
>>11
Hah, those too, of course. If seriously, I've written some pretty complex code in it and it performs pretty fast that I'm now writing almost all my high-level code in it, unless it's something previously written in another language and it's less effort to just extend that than port it.
>>12
That's very subjective. One man's meat is another man's poison.
>>13-14
Most people agree that Lisp's syntax is fucking awful, among languages not intended to be esoteric, only Forth and COBOL even come close to such shittiness in syntax.
>>16
[citation needed], also almost noone that actually spent a week writing Lisp code and has used a good structural editor thinks that. I very much prefer editing Lisp code to C or C# code, moving and transforming it is much easier, and reading the semantics is also easy by indentation.
Name:
Anonymous2012-02-28 16:20
>>19
Which part of ``fixing huge language warts in the IDE is not a solution'' do you fail to understand you mental midget? Your shift isn't over, go scrub another toilet.
>>27
Well I'm going to shove it down your faggot throat anyway, just like your five gay lovers do so with their cum despite your protests. Lisp syntax is fucking shit.