Is it too much to ask that when giving a book review, a link to the actual book title, and possibly a listing on a website, should be prominently given?
I wrote a Lisp in C and it worked out fine. It was pretty slow but had precise GC and was easy to extend. It was embedded in a commercial product that did ok.
I don't remember whether that was before or after I started absent-mindedly writing yet a different Lisp in C while hanging around RMS. He looked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing. I said writing a Lisp. He asked why I was doing that and I said everybody ought to write a Lisp. He thought about that for a few seconds, said "you should write it in assembler", and walked away.
The "Don't build your own Lisp" article seems reasonable to me and the book it negatively reviews ("Build your own Lisp", I guess) does sound bad.
The dig at Kernel is kind of depressing. It's probably an evolutionary dead end, but god damn it, the world is better when people try things. Dismissing them doesn't make you cool.
I don't see any comments on Kernel in the post. I didn't waste my time reading the book, but the post criticizes unhygiene F-expr, which is known to be awful and is exactly what Kernel aims to solve and supersede (via hygiene F-expr).
It requires faith and intuition. Faith is required to believe that if the stars align, and every incantation is correctly performed for this magical machine, the right thing will really happen. And intuition is required to work out what has gone wrong, and how to fix things when they don’t go as planned.
Unfortunately these can’t be taught directly…
> Testing is generally preferable to faith, and testing needn’t be difficult with computers.
Sounds like the sqlite development method. Faith and tests. No architectural planning, and lots of desastrous FTS attempts.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] thread[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal [1] https://norvig.com/lispy.html [2] https://norvig.com/lispy2.html [3] https://khamidou.com/compilers/lisp.py
I don't remember whether that was before or after I started absent-mindedly writing yet a different Lisp in C while hanging around RMS. He looked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing. I said writing a Lisp. He asked why I was doing that and I said everybody ought to write a Lisp. He thought about that for a few seconds, said "you should write it in assembler", and walked away.
The "Don't build your own Lisp" article seems reasonable to me and the book it negatively reviews ("Build your own Lisp", I guess) does sound bad.
Sounds like the sqlite development method. Faith and tests. No architectural planning, and lots of desastrous FTS attempts.