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by deterministic 19 days ago
I would be very interest in seeing how "getting lisp" enables you to write software that is more successful than the C and C++ software that runs the world. Perhaps you have written software in Lisp demonstrating this? Something you can show us?
2 comments
__patchbit__ 19 days ago
The reference text on time keeping used to be implemented in Lisp.

Alan Kay says a lot of problems with C/C++ go away when using the higher math more easily expressible in Lisp and like minded languages.

Jürgen Schmidhuber says the problem with computers from a mathematician's point of view are the numbers.

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deterministic 16 days ago
> Alan Kay says a lot of problems with C/C++ go away when using the higher math more easily expressible in Lisp and like minded languages

That doesn't match my experience at all. Math and numbers are in general not a problem except when (say) implementing triangle hit detection in a game (something I did) where the precision of 32 bit floats does matter.

> Jürgen Schmidhuber says the problem with computers from a mathematician's point of view are the numbers.

That is probably true if you are a mathematician. Most people aren't.

Having said that, LEAN (for example) is written in C++ and used heavily by mathematicians.

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anthk 19 days ago
Go ate a big lunch from Java, C and a bit of C++ as a systems' language, which Go was designed as "C sucessor without the C++ bullshit". Even the most modern C (Plan9/9front, not what the ANSI C comitee vomits in every iteration) it's a very different beast.

Still, Common Lisp it's in places where trying to build such kind of software in C/C++ would be a reciper for disasters.

https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

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deterministic 16 days ago
> Common Lisp it's in places where trying to build such kind of software in C/C++ would be a reciper for disasters.

I personally never blame the tools. I have written fairly complex software in 68000 assembler and it (1) worked fine and (2) was highly maintainable. However it was of course much slower to modify than using a higher level language.

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anthk 15 days ago
M68k asm can be easier than some C++ templates.
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