Joel on Software vs Paul Graham (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Joel on Software vs Paul Graham (2001)

joelonsoftware.com

46 pointscomicjk11 comments

This is a good article, but what does this have to do with Paul Graham? The title is confusing.

Yahoo Stores was Via Web which was built by pg.

There's a thread in some of the joelonsoftware discussion forums where Joel argues that pg's use of continuation-style passing and closures to represent web state made it difficult to use the back button and that it was the wrong thing to do. If I recall, pg also replied on that thread defending his decision.

Edit: Possibly relevant:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.280820....

relevance extracted:

    A long time ago I hypothesized that the cause of back 
    button not working in an early version of Yahoo! Stores 
    was because the pages of the wizard were implemented as 
    if they were subroutines, using a feature of Lisp that 
    Paul Graham advertised somewhere as a benefit. So now 
    all of a sudden I'm anti-Paul Graham and anti-Lisp and 
    anti-FP.

I'm sure you didn't intend this, but that's actually a very misleading quote out of context. It reads like he's explaining why he's anti-Paul Gram and anti-Lisp and anti-FP. What he actually means is that people are saying he's those things when he isn't.

Actually, the context has been deleted and by Joel himself. The OP link to the fogcreek page used to have a lively comments section where Joel was very snippy about Lisp and Paul Graham indeed. He was just being snarky, and didn't sound very smart. I emailed him Paul Graham's lengthy explanation of the usability quirk about the Back button and he modified his previous comments - it's always handy to be the guy who wrote the content management system where the comments are hosted - to include my info and sound less snippy, and essentially took credit for what I showed him.

I gather quite a few people remember that discussion, and that's why he's defending myself as being labelled anti-Lisp. He did sound that way, very strongly.

PG's original company ViaWeb was purchased by Yahoo! and became "Yahoo! Stores" the service being criticized.

PG was a founder of Viaweb, which Yahoo acquired and turned into Yahoo! Store

Why are you dredging up a ten-year-old non-controversy?

(Yes, HN is built on the same principle, which is how we end up with links that time-out, but that doesn't suddenly make what Joel thought ten years ago relevant.)

Deleted comment

That's ridiculous. What does UNIX and Lisp have to do with the back button?

Breaking the back button isn't "ugly," it's broken.

On the other hand, in specific terms, this whole discussion is about something that happened a bazillion years ago, who cares?

He brought this up on Dev Days too (2009?) and made a jab at the lisp backend not knowing how to handle the back button. It's sort of low to keep hearkening back to the same usability mishap.

Also IIRC a lot of websites behaved this way back then. Hell, some still do today.

This is a non-story.

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