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by camccann 6013 days ago
A competition to solve a toy problem wouldn't necessarily say much, though. So the question is, how big of a problem would you need, and where are you going to find enough programmers (of reasonable and roughly similar competence) who don't have anything better to do than spend multiple hours participating in a glorified programming language pissing match?

In other words, the reason why not is probably "because organizing things is hard work".
1 comments
trapper 6013 days ago
If the effect size is large (i.e. the magnitude of difference between the means of lisp vs non-lisp programmers) the size of problem should be irrelevant.

Many thousands of programmers spend hours each week in pissing matches online. Why is it none of them feel like truly putting their money where their mouth is?

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camccann 6012 days ago
If the effect size is large (i.e. the magnitude of difference between the means of lisp vs non-lisp programmers) the size of problem should be irrelevant.

Writing a "Hello, world" is going to take about the same amount of time in any language that isn't a turing tarpit. At issue is generally some sort of asymptotic advantage, not a guarantee of "language X will always be superior every time always". In fact, for any pair of one easy and one hard problem, I'm pretty confident I could find (or invent, if necessary) two languages that each beat the other for solving one of the problems.

The claimed benefits of a more expressive language generally involve things like better management of application complexity, or greater ability to modify and restructure late in the project. Hammering out a program of a scale such that the programmer can keep an accurate model of the entire thing in mind at one time, and that is only written and never modified, would be more a measure of the programmer's typing speed and the sophistication of the IDE used than anything else.

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prodigal_erik 6011 days ago
If a problem is so trivial that creating a domain-specific language isn't worth the effort, the best solution will be equally ugly in any language and Lisp loses its advantages.
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