Re: How to survive using a non Lisp language?

From: Will Hartung (willh_at_msoft.com)
Date: 12/02/04 

Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 10:04:56 -0800

"Jeff Sandys" <sandysj@juno.com> wrote in message
news:41AF498F.2F7ABC02@juno.com...
> A friend of mine works in a java shop and he uses Jython,
> writes all his code with python syntax and delivers jars.
> No one has caught on that he is programming in python,
> since he produces more than anyone elso, no one cares.

That's funny. The detail here is that "they care", they just don't know it
yet. They'll care when you friend moves on somewhere else, or gets hit by a
bus, or goes on vacation and a bug turns up in "his jar file". Believe me,
they DO care. What you have here is a ticking time bomb. If he's that
productive, then he should bring everyone more up to speed so they can all
be more productive. If management won't support that, imagine how they'll
feel when a chunk of their app is not maintainable by the rest of the team.

> Isn't there a version of lisp or scheme written in java?
> As long as you deliver working jars, do they care about
> the source code?

Clients may not care about source code, but the folks responsible for the
development and, most importantly, the maintenance most certainly do care
about source code.

As with any form of abstraction, you be "program to the interface". If your
interface to the project is mainstream Java source code, then folks probably
don't care whether you used Notepad, Emacs, cat > File.java, or
(compile-to-java "myproject.lisp").

But if you're delivering one thing, jar files, and they're expecting the
other, Java source code, but they see jar file and ASSUME that there's Java
source code behind it, then someone is in for a VERY rude shock when they
look behind the curtain and find that assumption voided.

Regards,

Will Hartung
(willh@msoft.com)

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