dajt

Yeah, my comment was a bit snarky. At least CL admits side-effects and non-pure functional programming are necessary.

McCarthy obv knew what he wanted to be able to express and process, but the LISP he ended up with after the s-expression interpreter was hacked together was like the assembly language he was going to compile m-expressions down to.

At the time his main alternative seemed to be FORTRAN. It would be interesting to see if he came up with the same ideas with today's computing landscape and keyboards that had more characters than a card punch. You could argue that many of today's languages incorporate more and more LISP ideas as they evolve but it still might look and work a bit different.

"I do it to grow as a software engineer"

That's why I keep poking at CL, and don't bother much with the others. I don't think I'll get much of a paradigm shift from D or python but if I ever grok CL properly I'll feel I've learned something.

I've spent a single day in NYC all my life so have no idea.

I'm wondering if ferries are easier to run as there is less infrastructure. There are the equivalent of stations and maintenance depots, but not rails. I don't know who owns the ferry infrastructure or if it is shared.

If you privatised the trains, would the different operators share tracks and stations? If so who would own and maintain them? My guess is the operators would baulk at the idea of maintaining ANY infrastructure and just want to run trains leased from the govt, over a system maintained by the govt, who now has less revenue from the fares.

In NSW our railway barely if never got to operational status under private ownership. The govt took it over immediately and it has been priceless for the state ever since. But of course bean counters have been complaining about it for decades now. I think there has been privatisation stuff going on for a while like the airport line. They were also trying to disentangle the various routes so they could sell them off, but that is hard because they didn't need to be planned that way when built.

It seems to me like a city's metro system is too important to leave in the hands of private operators whose only reason to exist is to make a profit and that will bail out the second things are not worth its time and money. If the metro chokes, so does the city.

"All of those things are there for a reason, and most of them are very well thought out"

From reading about the history of LISP I'm not sure I agree. My take on it is that It was never meant to become a real language as it is now, some guy hacked together an interpreter for the s-expressions because it looked fun and easy, no-one ever bothered to take it further, and here we are.

LISP seems to be the bare mininum required to do whatever McCarthy was starting to explore and these days a lot of LISP nuts seem to think it is the coolest thing ever because of its minimalism without realising it was never meant to be that way.

Yeah, you can express anything in lists. You can also express any program in a turning machine. Doesn't mean you should.

But I don't know LISP well enough to say whether people who are commercially successful with LISP owe it to the language, or they would have been whatever language they use.

I agree with the risk/reward thing. I think you need to take into account how likely you are to use the language before investing a lot into it.

I ignore smalltalk, ruby, perl, python, all that stuff. I don't want to use them, and somthing like smalltalk probably won't earn me money. Rust and D are similar. I've always thought D was interesting but I can't see it being worth my while to put the effort into it. Rust is just too different to bother with unless it becomes the new C++.

I think swift might be worth a look, as long as Apple doesn't drop it like dylan. It is close enough to what I know that it might not take an age to learn.

CL is good for nerd-cred, and gives a good leg up for Clojure. It probably also has some fundamental lesson to teach different to what I know instinctively. So I keep poking at it hoping it will click one day. Clojure seems like it would be a good thing to be able to claim knowledge of.

I keep bouncing off LISP, but keep coming back assuming there is something I'm missing.

I'm not convinced it is just 'what is the difference between setp, setf, defvar, and defparameter?' I think it is fundamentally different to how I approach programming.

I learned programming back in the 8-bit era, taught myself assembly, etc. I'm almost a hard-coded imperative programmer. I took to C and Java like a duck to water, and I'm guessing LISP advocates think I'm irreparably broken.

I agree with TeMPOraL that picking up a book to learn things is a good way to go and shouldn't be seen as a black mark against a language. The problem these days is that most books are rubbish. Every Clojure book I've seen is just garbage. I'm guessing CL books are better in regards to technical quality because not every average programmer can vomit one up but everything I've encountered invariably harps on about how much better LISP is than every other idea ever, and how concise and elegant it is, and the general smugness drives me nuts.

Practical Common LISP is better than most in that regard but it still falls into the trap about how expressive and concise and elegant and awesome LISP is right before showing 3 lines of code I have to spend a long time digesting.

I assume I'll get it one day, but it's like turning a container ship going really fast at the moment.

I'm wondering if the best way to understand LISP is to write a CL interpreter.

No chance. The deferred maintenance would be even worse, operators would come and go rebranding everything every few years, they'd all point fingers at each other when something went wrong... ugh.

Look at the mess the UK rail system is in - absurdly high ticket prices, confusing interconnections, bad service, finger pointing, bad maintenance, it's a mess.

The original railways were privately owned and apparently worked pretty well but it is a different world now. Minimal costs trump all else and that's no way to run a city's mass transit system. They will never be profitable enterprises, they are a public service, for the good of the public and the city itself.

Look up mechanical signal interlocking. It's pretty interesting.

Because the NSA is keeping those secret so they can still use them. All these recent 'leaks' are just misdirection so when OpenBSD becomes the defacto standard PC OS they still have a way in ;)

That's my take on the mobile phone market. Pointless money and effort wasted every year rather than keeping the current perfectly good phone going with further OS updates.

He didn't say a lot of people were crying out for a 3rd way, just that some were. I'm guessing there were not many.

It's the same with the GNU/linux desktop. In the overall user population only a tiny fraction of people care about "freedom" and most (including me) are happy to go with Windows or OS-X.

The fraction of people who care about this stuff is vanishingly small.

That looks really cool. I built the cpuville kit a few years ago but its I/O decoding was borked, it didn't expose enough control signals through its extension mechanism, and its pin headers were at an odd spacing so you couldn't just plug a prototyping board onto it.

I designed a and built new I/O extender to fix all those problems but PCB design is not fun for me so I never made a PCB for it.

This one looks to have none of those problems.

Eh? Just write your own bank switching code. The whole setup is different to MMU paging. Not having looked at the specs I'm guessing you do an I/O write to something that sets the bits of the address lines above 15 to select the bank.

You could go two ways:

1. Have some amount of RAM outside the bank switching scheme so code and data living there is always available and bank switch above or below that fixed area.

2. Switch the entire 64k at a time, meaning your code and data has to be copied into the same place in each bank.

Because for a certain type of person having your code run on a real Z80 is much cooler.

I only use facebook for the model engineering group(s) and unless they decide discussions about miniature locos are dodgy I should be okay.

I can see there is a potential trap there for the people who decide to mix their personal and professional lives on something like facebook. I just think it is unlikely to get sprung, and comments like "why on earth don't they take complete control of their online presence and register their domain, get their system hosted, set up all their e-mail addresses, etc" could only be written somewhere like HN. The rest of the world would just shake their head slowly.

My day job is software development, and your second paragraph made me shudder. So imagine what someone who doesn't want anything to do with IT would think!

The majority of the world do not want to know about containers, hosting services, domain names, or anything else that is related to computers.

I'm not even sure that is changing with younger people - they're happy enough to dick around with social media but don't want to get involved in running a web site and all the software on it.

If a business can work with a "no obvious cost" platform like facebook, the owner won't start paying for something "better" in response to non-quantifiable downsides and threats possibly posed by the platform.

There are no costs for IT I'd be willing to pay for. The nature of the business is such that it wouldn't even be worth having a shopping cart type app running.

The web presence of the business would basically be an advertisement, newsletter, and contact page.

There are related businesses that sell lots of small items, eg nuts, bolts, material, that would be a lot more convenient to use with a shopping cart, but mine doesn't need it.

I may have a business one day that sells bits for model steam locos. Many people who are likely to be my customers belong to a facebook group, and probably don't use their PCs much except for facebook and e-mail.

And if I needed to post a controversial point of view on my model steam loco business page, I've got bigger problems than facebook.

I can't stand facebook, but for my purposes it is probably the cheapest, most direct, and low effort way for those people to get to me. It's also probably pretty low effort on my part.

The business would never be more than a cottage industry and I certainly wouldn't want to spend ANY money on IT that I could avoid.

Anyone here offering to donate their time to keep all my IT in order for the same cost I can do it with facebook, and give me the exposure it will to my potential customers?

If so I'll give you my gmail address to get in contact ;)

What about printing two images, each with only 1 black pixel in a different place?

Airports take a lot more space than train stations.

Living near an airport is horrible due to noise. Trains are a lot quieter than planes.

You can fit more people on a train than on a plane.

You can load that train with more people a lot more quickly than a plane.

Train stations can be underground if necessary.

You'll have less pollution from the train.

One downside pointed out below, it seems there is a problem with building the rail line. You need to train up high speed rail engineers, create the manufacturing base to make the thing and maintain it, and probably won't have another in the whole country. Or maybe one other in the north east.

It isn't security I'd be worried about. I'm sure there is some real wizardry in the formatting algorithms and many bugs related to it fixed over the years. Rewriting the TeX engine would just be a huge effort to almost certainly arrive at an inferior and incompatible clone.

Knuth spent all those years getting rid of bugs and this guy wants to bring them back? I didn't get that impression.

I thought Be would be the spiritual successor to the Amiga and attractive to the original Amiga user base. Having said that I didn't buy one because I didn't want to spend time and money on a platform that was obviously not going anywhere. Even a Mac would be a reasonable place for an ex-Amiganaut to end up. I didn't go there either because while I thought the original OS-X was a great idea I think it got more fragmented and further from the lauded Apple design brilliance with every release. Plus Apple stuff is stupid expensive for what you get.

Yep, it's just a hobby and not a terribly expensive one as you say.

I loved my Amiga 500 & 2000 back in the day, and spent more on them than this costs although it was obvious they were never going to be main stream.

I wouldn't do it now, but good luck to those who do.