Steam Lisp
loper-os.org
loper-os.org
Personally, for all the problems and terrible design decisions that we're all living with, I find a whole lot of what fellow programmers do amazing and inspirational. A lot of the stuff they produce with so-called broken and unproductive tools are amazing products that provide a lot of productivity and enjoyment for a wide range of people. I've also found that almost any sufficiently popular language or environment has its share of brilliant, original thinkers trying to build new tools to make things easier and better for others. These are people who should be thanked and celebrated for their contributions.
I looked further into the author's blog posts. The dominant themes are bilious and scornful attacks on other's work, or lamentations about the sad state of software today. He claims to be producing a Lisp-based operating system. Curious to see his progress, I checked the source repository, to find that it only contains a README indignantly protesting the the treatment he's received from others.
This guy's combination of arrogance, scorn, and complete lack of demonstrated competence makes him oddly fascinating. I wonder what kind of social factors in our industry produce people like this, and how we can work to counteract them.
Funny -- I wrote something more polite but similar to this in 2010 about another post of his: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... .
That is a conditional statement, not a biconditional. Which is why for every single successful innovator, we can often find thousands of nutcases, inventing floating shoes, helmet mounted rifles, and Forth (just kidding, mostly). Therefore, an unconventional person should be especially careful that they do not find themselves on the wrong side of the thin line between genius and insanity.
"What can be said of this? If, in order to 'really' enter a programming culture, I need to both 'be solving a significant real problem in the real world' and exercising 'the freedom to change the language, the compiler, the OS or even the hardware design', then there are very few options for entering this culture indeed. The requirement for 'real world work' is almost by definition incompatible with 'the freedom to change the language, the compiler, the OS and the hardware design'."
Of course lacking such a facility I just end up scattering extra locals even though I end up feeling like the output is rather archaic. a = ...; b = ...; c = f(a,b);
The real problem is that it's hard to distinguish "best" practices from conventional practices. Innovators are necessarily unconventional, but the ones we care about are also necessarily demonstrably good (in some sense). So there is this claim from the innovator side that "unconventional" is not a valid argument.
This claim only makes sense in the presence of an "unconventional" judgment -- i.e. that this creative work is necessarily deficient simply because it is unconventional.
Now, of course, no critic would put it so bluntly. But I think it illustrates the underlying dynamic.
The concept of the personal GUI workstation, the object-oriented database, and many other things you take for granted were introduced on Lisp Machines. Does this fact convince you of anything?
Imagine doing that all day long, every day.
And here's a version which has been automated with some strings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca0Ea_oPto8 and apparently got its inventor immediately fired.