Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
> It was on the front page ... it hit the top spot. Various people in the community clearly did think it met the bar.
It was on the front page. It hit the top spot. Then it got flagged. Many people in the community clearly did think it was clickbait and did not meet the bar!
> If ever you make a mistake, never, ever write it up.
Sure you can write it up! But post it to maybe, Reddit?
The HN audience expects certain standard of quality and insight in the article if the article is on the front page.
Here the community has voted that this article does not meet the bar. I can't speak for others but for me this article is too obvious and uninteresting.
Instead of complaining about something that didn't happen here (nobody said the OP was stupid), maybe learn from the community feedback and refrain from posting articles that don't meet the community expectations?
Ah! Misunderstood your original comment. My apologies! Yes, I am with you when you question the usefulness of the multiplication syntax.
I prefer simplicity and consistency in a programming language grammar, syntax and semantics as I advocated above. So yes I'd be happy to lose that multiplication syntax. It is not worth it.
> If you’re already trusting it for your IP address, you might as well trust it with the current UTC time
I don't follow! How does trusting DHCP with IP address automatically mean I should trust it with the current UTC time?
Time requires higher degree of trust than IP.
I may not care what my IP address looks like but I might care a lot about what the current UTC time is and I might want this to come from a more trustworthy device.
> What problems is it solving that require the confusion that it generates?
I think I answered that already. It keeps the language spec consistent and simpler.
Imagine the complexity you have to add to the language spec to say that when we write [] we deal with the reference to this list except in the multiplication syntax a = [[]] * 5 where the inner [] is not a reference to the list but the list value! Such special case will make the language both inconsistent and harder to understand for experienced programmers.
> that is worth the complexity tradeoff of people often using it subtly wrong?
I don't think that makes the complexity tradeoff worth it. This is the kind of tradeoff that makes the language implementation, reference and semantics more and more complex. Unfortunately Python has a lot of such complexities already. We don't need more of it. Such complexity hurts the creation of completing implementations.
IMHO programming language specifications and implementations should be simple and consistent so that competing implementations can be developed easily.
> people often using it subtly wrong?
I think that... you know... before writing serious software, these people need to roll up their sleeves and just learn the damn language. Just learn what references are and how they work in Python. It's not that hard. It is most definitely easier than adding a sphagetti monster to the compiler make it bend to the will of programmers who can't be bothered to read the tutorial. I mean this gotcha about references is taught in the 4th chapter of the tutorial. Can't developers even bother to RTFM these days before developing serious software with a programming language?
"less than 2 drinks a day" would be called "moderate drinking" in my culture. I mean if someone is having a drink or two everyday that is moderate drinking already.
Light drinking for us would be like 3 drinks in a week! 4 drinks/week or more gets us into the moderate drinking territory.
> Of course they phrased it that way on purpose because implying causality makes their results sound way more important than they are.
How do you know that? I am at a loss to understand how someone on HN can read one sentence and begin drawing conclusions about what other ulterior motives they had while writing the sentence?
Maybe that sentence means exactly what it says and nothing more which is Z is a function of X and Y? Why perform psychoanalysis on that sentence? And if you have to perform psychoanalysis of that sentence, at least substantiate your conclusion by telling us what process you followed to rule out about a 100 other possible ulterior motives and conclude that "makes their results sound way more important than they are" is most definitely the ulterior motive they had?
> Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction?
Because we are on a tech website and as good samaritans we want to help each other out by sharing the information, knowledge, projects, tools or recommendations we have?
(2011) that article. That's like 13 years old. I very well remember 13 years ago the FANG were not filled with middle managers like they are today. Massive cultural shifts in these places since then.
This might sound crazy or stupid but I really want to know if there is some Lisp with manual memory management? I love Lisp syntax. People complain about the parentheses but for me they are a blessing. I like how extremely uniform and regular they look.
But all Lisps I've seen have garbage collectors. If I could find a Lisp with manual memory management, I could ditch C++ in favor of that Lisp. Is there one?
Entirely unrelated to the post? Entirely? The post talks:
"To write Common Lisp code with comfort and still have the ability to interact with REPL, you can choose your favorite IDE"
And then it goes on to provide some recommendations for major editors out there. So the GP is at least a little related to the post?
I did not get the impression of any flame war in the GP. As a Emacs user myself I am well aware that everyone does not like to use Emacs. Many like Vim. I don't see the problem with recommending a Vim setup for Lisp. We need more recommendations like that for different editors to make Lisp programming more attractive to people of all types of technical background.
> that documentation doesn't matter and nobody reads it anyway
Did I say that? I don't think so. I said that it is possible to create key mappings without reading 18 chapters of documentation. How? By looking up what we need.
But Emacs users do read the documentation but not necessarily in a linear manner where they must start from Chapter 1 and go all the way to Chapter 18 before they are able to do something. Some people might it read like that. But most people including myself read the parts that matter to us.