dwc

I don't agree with your Jane Street / money reasoning. I had never heard of Jane Street until I started looking at OCaml. That Jane Street makes money and is "all in" on OCaml does support the idea that one can use OCaml for serious projects. But does anyone really think (even subconsciously) that using OCaml will make them rich, just because?

Instead of toughening up, I'd suggest two things:

* Try to get ahead in your day job. This doesn't necessarily mean making the big bucks. It means being someone who deserves the big bucks. To find better work and more money you'll probably have to leave. Maybe not, but probably.

* Find new jobs through word of mouth, networking, etc. In my experience, this does not equal a slam dunk hire, but it'll get you an interview and they will actually converse with you. They want to find out why you were recommended, and that's a whole different feeling that being "screened".

Potential sources of recommendations and job leads include former coworkers (and bosses!), people you meet at user groups, interest groups, etc.

I sympathize. Different concerns pull lisp in different directions.

CL is, and always has been, about getting stuff done and isn't above having some warts, especially historical warts.

Scheme was more academic and elegant, but not great for real world use until some implementations "fixed" that. Racket, for instance, isn't quite a proper Scheme any longer, but is definitely practical.

Clojure looks interesting, but I have absolutely no need or desire to use a JVM-based language.

The conflict between the article title and the domain name is delicious.

I think this is correct. I am not sure if unions would help at this point, unless they can lobby for laws to prevent moving manufacturing out of the country. Paying lower wages for manufacturing (as well as other lower costs) being the reason for why those jobs went somewhere else in the first place. Where "went somewhere else" means companies actively decided they wanted to stop manufacturing here and do it somewhere cheaper, and not hassle with unions.

I've struggled with this myself. A while back, due to linkage from here and other sites, I had used up my free allotment of free nytimes stories and thought, "hey, let me see if I can pay a bit to raise the limit, because I'm willing to pay a bit for journalism." So I checked out their subscription plans and could find nothing even remotely close to worthwhile for me.

There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:

* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories/month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.

* The subscriptions were for what I'd call "odd" time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.

Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.

> The explore link was visible from our sign in page

I had clicked through to a fair number of pages, but not finding any repos I wasn't prepared to sign up, so I missed the repos ;-)

> I made it visible in the top menu of our static website

Quite visible now. I'd guess that if it had been there before I would have clicked on it. Time will tell if it makes a difference. Best wishes.

> You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore

Gitlab often comes up in these discussions. Ok, it comes up every time. Several times in the past I've went and checked it out and it seems interesting except...I couldn't find any actual projects from the main gitlab.com page, aside from the gitlab CE repo itself. So thanks for posting that link!

I have to wonder why it's not more prominent. And where's the search to find repos? I regularly find useful repos on github by searching for them. Discoverability is important to me.

People still do good things with greenhouses. I recently watched a video from a guy growing veggies through the winter in his greenhouse. He did have a non-glass southern wall but it wasn't the type for storing heat. Instead, he was using drums of water inside the greenhouse as thermal mass, which kept the temperature up during the night.

Almost everyone I work with uses ZNC. I've stuck with my same old method of tmux/screen and a text mode client. Apparently ZNC isn't hard to set up or use but I have no direct experience with it.

Turning on logging in most IRC clients is very easy. But once again this is an extra step and means learning the client a bit. One nice thing is that I can have those logs offline and search them whenever and however I like. I regularly do search my irc logs to find that links I didn't save, or re-read an important discussion.

Most things in slack are available in some form with irc, but not preconfigured out of the box. And some things on irc can take some fiddling to get set up right, and you can't count on everyone else to have enabled support.

On a daily basis I work with C and a handful of modern languages. I do reach for Common Lisp and Prolog sometimes, so I'll count those.

Common Lisp: many, many great things about lisp have been incorporated into modern languages, but CL still has a few unique things, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's less compelling than it was 10 years ago but some problems are expressed more wonderfully in CL than in other languages.

Prolog: when prolog is the right tool then you really can't beat it. You can substitute another logic language if you like, but I'm not aware of major borrowing by modern languages (the odd library doesn't really count).

Things I'm meaning to look into but haven't really used yet:

Forth: I poke at forth every couple of years but always leave off to go do something else. I'm pretty sure I don't want to embrace the whole forth philosophy thing (real forth people are, uh, different), and doing a deep dive to see what I can take with me is something I just haven't made time for.

Snobol: I'm not really interested in Snobol wholesale at this point, but I want to explore how PEGs are used. There are PEG libraries available for other languages and I'd like to see how much benefit there is to be had from working in a modern language with a PEG library.

I had a lower back injury at about that age resulting in a ruptured disk. It was debilitating and required surgery. The surgery worked wonders but, unsurprisingly, I've had intermittent back trouble in the decades since then.

I've had two periods of my life where I've been free from back problems for extended periods. The first was when I was doing aikido. There was some minimal warm up stretching, but the main thing was that practice involved a lot of range of motion. Despite seemingly bad things like awkward positions and getting thrown and hitting the ground hard, I had no back problems at all during that time. The second time was when I was lifting free weights. Squats and deadlifts (done correctly) strengthen the support infrastructure for the back (and everything else). During both of those regimens I also lost a fair amount of fat. (I actually gained weight while lifting but my wife remarked that I looked thinner).

I think that many kinds of exercise could have similar effects. Yoga, anyone? Maybe Tai Chi? Man, I need to get back to doing something regularly again!

Shredder claimed to have human-like play at lower levels, so I gave that a try. It works surprisingly well at my level, making plausible mistakes in a fairly consistent manner. When I was playing against it I was in the 1200-1500 range, so I don't know how well it does at higher levels. Also, it had a setting where it would rate you and auto-adjust itself for the next game.

It made playing against a program a lot nicer than other chess programs I had tried.

How sure are you about that?

Erlang's pattern matching allows a great many things to be done in a declarative style. For some problems you end up with a lot of pattern stuff and not all that much "normal" code. Or you pattern match through what would ordinarily be a lot of flow control statements, for each case writing very simple code to handle that one thing.

Since Erlang isn't a declarative language in the larger sense, that's my guess what he meant.

This is also an area that can be studied. In addition to the other points it's worth looking at recidivism rates, which are much lower in places like Norway than in the US.

The major reasons for success of Scandinavian countries in crime and punishment are larger than a single metric, IMHO. They have a (more) comprehensive philosophy that touches on many areas, all of which work together.

If the US adopted the prison conditions and lighter sentencing of Norway without other measures, it would be a complete disaster. For the US to get similar benefits we would need to (ideally) first shift our attitude toward thinking of criminals as people, and thinking most of what benefits society rather than how to punish for punishment's sake.

> Everything about the landing except the stuck leg seemed to be perfect.

And there's the issue: it only takes a tiny bit of imperfect to ruin a landing.

I do think that SpaceX is going to get to the point where they are recovering enough of their rockets to make it pay off. But there will probably always be a significant chance that some little thing will go wrong. Don't be fooled later by "we've landed 5 in a row" about that.

I think the median numbers (in combination with mean) would be very interesting. I am suspicious that numbers like that are not spread anywhere close to evenly through those demographic groups.

I would rather not say until I've thought it out some more. A bag of mushy thoughts with a grain of truth in them would probably be provocative and wouldn't provide much utility for the CL community.

Instead, here's one of the things that started me thinking about this... Some years back, Xach created the library manager Quicklisp, filling a huge hole in the lisp ecosystem. It's nice work and quickly became the defacto standard. Lots good to say about it and nothing bad, really. The thing that got me thinking was that this actually needed to be done at the time Xach did it. CL had been around a long time officially and even longer unofficially, and this really important piece of infrastructure had not been done. How could that be?

"How could that be?" leads to more questions, and possible answers, and some loose ideas about moving forward. That's where I'm at, and I don't want to say more until I have something concrete and constructive. I wouldn't mind having a speculative conversation (that would help me greatly), but I think throwing out half baked ideas would do nothing more than the existing corpus of "why lisp isn't successful" blog posts, so I don't want to have that conversation somewhere like HN.

> mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL ... you'd have to focus on attracting new users

It's my observation that CL regularly attracts new users, who grumble a bit at first and then fall in love. Then they drift away to other langs, keeping an affection for sexps, macros, and the numerous elegant aspects of CL. But drift away they do. IMO, if CL could keep more of the people who learn it well enough to love it, then it would be thriving. I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time.

I'm a little surprised that there weren't more and better examples of how ad tech is misused. Also missing was any sort of vision of how things should be. It's nice to see this attitude in Ad Age, though.

This parallels how I try to approach learning. For me, the "meta" idea is that I need some kind of mental model / framework before I can learn many details. Once that framework is there I can hang new knowledge on it without much trouble. So steps 1 and 2 are geared toward building that framework. Step 3 is about making things, which is where you'll spend a lot of time acquiring a lot of in-depth knowledge.

I'd substitute tutorials for videos. I usually avoid videos for many of the same reasons as you. But I've also taken advantage of some excellent ones.

> Humans have a physiological aversion to the very idea of eating less, evolution baked it into our bones.

I'm not so sure about this. I recall reading (but can't find right now) about some Asian cultures (IIRC) that find eating too much to be unpleasant, as it makes you feel sluggish bodily and slows your thinking down. "Too much" for them being something like what Westerners would consider "satisfied".

I study Norwegian, and I've seen some odd things like that in Google Translate. For instance, one time I translated a sentence containing a prominent Norwegian university that got translated to Princeton in English. I'm inclined to think that this wasn't malicious or a joke, but simply a deficiency in the automation. I've read a little bit about how Google Translate's automated stuff works, but not enough to feel confident to suggest how or why these kinds of errors happen.

I'm a language learner myself, and I also frequent various reddit language subreddits and read all the stories of other people.

My belief is that "don't have time" usually means "I've lost motivation after the initial high". A huge problem with language learning is that unless you have moved to another country or otherwise in an immersive environment then it becomes quite difficult to keep motivation and discipline high. The reward of "I can read/write/speak/listen a little better than last month" starts to pale and people realize they actually don't use their new skill on a regular basis. And like many things, getting to the next proficiency level takes increasing amounts of work. The flip side being that for X weeks of study less and less progress seems to be made.

What I'm getting at is that this churn is not a problem with your product, but a broad problem with language learning. Anything you can do to solve (or lessen) these problem is a big, uncertain task. But it's probably the only way to reduce churn. The upside is that if you do manage to make headway then you've done something major. Really major.

> over-abstraction is not a disease that affects only OO languages

Agreed, it's present in other languages and has been with us a long time. It does seem to have reached a fever pitch in mainstream OO culture. OO seems to encourage taking even a small piece and giving it the full-blown treatment of layers, design patterns, DI, and the rest. Because each piece is a whole, in a way, so it deserves it, right? Give each part of a program that treatment, and the whole becomes unwieldy to a degree that was seldom seen before OO.

The ideas are still useful today, surprisingly often, despite Pike's quote.

> Maybe you understand it because you accept sociopaths as your representatives?

Now, now, let's not be like that. You do NOT have to agree with something to try understanding someone else's point of view or thought processes.

Understanding a point of view gives you a better chance of bringing someone around. Also, this isn't limited to politicians. Almost any form of authority, public or private, comes with the same attitudes. Think prosecutorial immunity and the like. Or how some company management views things. There's usually a fair amount of "the ends justifying the means" in there somewhere.