Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

So already, Common Lisp addresses people with 1 IQ point more than C
programmers :-(.

It's not so much that. It's the fact that it's hard to teach old dogs
new tricks, and most people come to Lisp after years of experience
with other languages. They have 1 IQ point *more* as evidenced by the
fact that they found Lisp, but it will take a bit of work to break
them of their bad thinking habits.

But I still fail to see how that prevent people to _learn_. The
first thing any Lisp tutorial I've ever seen teaches, is how to enter
forms at the REPL and watch for the result or error message printed.
Quite naturally. Or do you want lisp tutorials to teach the C process?

I don't want to teach the C process at all. I want to more gently
explain the fact that you don't have to write, compile, and run whole
programs in order to write programs. I want to gently introduce
people to writing, compiling, and running individual functions and
seeing immediately the productivity benefits.

But I also want to reassure people that you can produce as the final
product of your work something that can easily be handled and thrown
around. If all you ever show people is the REPL, they will have a
hard time believing that they can do anything practical with it.

It's like giving someone a very ugly food that tastes wonderful - the
human brain has a hard time letting us enjoy an experience when it is
freaked out about something superficial to the experience.

By the way, this is not different to the L.S.E. Manual I learned
programming with in 1975, or any BASIC tutorial at about the same
time: the first thing you learned was how to use the REPL! The
strange way was to save a file (or a card deck) and to send it to the
compiler to get a listing of error messages five minutes (or a day)
later.

I started to learn programming on BASIC in the mid-80's. However,
once I discovered real programming languages like C, I lost touch with
the REPL concept. Most people who started like that did the same.
Those who started later never learned about REPLs and only know one
way of doing things. That is the audience that is trying Lisp -
anyone who started learning Lisp in 1975 doesn't have to be convinced
of a thing here.

Anyhow, change what I said to "Neither of these applies directly to
the Lisp way of doing things." No sane Lisp programmer would tell you
to write all your code, compile it down to a single executable, and
run it. You build it up in smaller pieces and test them as you go.
That's one of the chief advantages of programming in Lisp, and it just
plain does not translate into "write, compile, run the whole thing,
and go hunting for bugs" the way other languages encourage you to do
things.

Yes, as it's explained in any lisp tutorial. Or do you mean that
people try to learn lisp without reading lisp books and lisp
tutorials?

See above. It tastes great and it's good for the health, but it looks
so weird that the brain refuses to accept that it has any positive
qualities whatsoever.

That said, it would be great if there were easy-to-find tutorials that
got people past the real barriers to entry.

Go tell that to Google! Why a search for lisp tutorial doesn't return
as first hit: http://www.cliki.net/Online%20Tutorial ?

Google pagerank works largely by who links to you and what they say
about you. If people were talking about it being useful, it would
show up on Google. :)

Lisp newbies don't need
to spend hours reading through ridiculously long tutorials on how to
write a recursive function. If they have programming experience, they
know all that and are not held back by it at all. Where they need
hand-holding is summarized in my previous message on this thread.

Perhaps you could write this hand-holding tutorial? You could even
insert it in first position on that cliki.net page.

I'm not good at holding hands. I may try, nonetheless, but not if
people here think I'm so far off-base as to make anything I write
based upon these assumptions totally worthless.
.

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