Re: Why Lisp is too hard for me to use

From: Tayssir John Gabbour (tayss_temp2_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/29/03 

Date: 29 Dec 2003 05:15:23 -0800

Greg Menke <gregm-news@toadmail.com> wrote in message news:<m3llowi5gq.fsf@europa.pienet>...
> > Ferguson, _High Stakes, No Prisoners_
[...]
> > Nagel and Holden, _Strategy and Tactics of Pricing_ 3rd ed.
>
> Please humor me and provide some quotes.

You didn't seem to be interested in bringing up any new points (I read
Slashdot too, you know), so when I cracked open the pricing book and
noticed how much the index sucked, I didn't think it worthwhile to do
exacting research, and just mentioned the book for anyone who might
want a worthwhile read in the bookstore.

Should I reduce a book to soundbites so we can have a nice flame?
Maybe gift you a little target to fire at? I seriously doubt that
approach actually works in reality. We'll just both be swallowed by
Usenet, a sea of forgotten arguments.

> > You forgot, they eat babies. The cute ones.
>
> You've obviously not spent enough time writing software for the Win32
> API, using Visual Basic, or trying to sysadmin a Windows network with
> more than a few machines.

That's because I know better than to do such things. In the same way,
I do not install every lisp library or gnu/Linux distro because these
things tend to improve with time. In particular, .net seems to be a
decent though limited system, and eventually the legacy Win32 api may
be written in terms of it.

Of course Windows has sharp edges. They employ 50k people, and no
matter how well they answer some interview puzzles, some will suck.
In fact, popularity often brings burdens.

Just the other day, I noticed a Mac dev complaining about Apple's
willingness to break backwards compat:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=98013&ixReplies=22
whereas Microsoft seems to have the problem that they bend over
backwards to keep it, which can lead to nonconformance to standards
and painful apis.

Sure, no doubt the Mac is currently nicer than Windows, but after
reading enough of Ted Nelson's writings recently, they both look the
same to me. Mac is more facist but more usable. Maybe Microsoft will
pull ahead with Longhorn, maybe not. Yawn.

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