I think "T"'s comments on the Python community are depressingly close to the truth.
It is very easy to find pythonistas on python-list who are eager to tell you how wrong you are, or how you shouldn't even want to do <X> because it's not "pythonic".
I think Yegge was right, and that this is the main thing holding Python back.
That said, I still generally like the language itself.
Well, the basic parts of the site are self-evident, certainly to anyone interested in the hacker community. And the other, more esoteric aspects of the site are 1) in the source and 2) occasionally mentioned in articles.
Not sure I would say that it is a red flag about the site.
I would say it's a red flag about the site. It's certainly not a red flag about the person (why should you have to read through the source to work out how the software works? There isn't even a link to the source from the software beyond using a Google search).
I'd say its fun and a challenge to find things by exploration. In some cases, such as poll posting, they are deliberately left unpublicized to prevent over abuse.
Because they're not very useful if nobody knows what they are or what they do.
I suppose they're kind of cute, in an easter-egg sort of sense. But I really don't see why HN just couldn't have a regular landing page or maybe a sidebar with these links on them, along with maybe a caption or tooltip describing what they're for.
Why all the mystery? It really makes the site much less useful for huge numbers of people to keep this stuff semi-hidden.
Guile had a bunch of intentions towards being a language-agnostic VM, a decade before that was popular.
RMS has been deathly afraid of losing total control over developer tools -- GCC's whole architecture was purposely designed to frustrate anyone trying to write out-of-tree code that handles/produces any of its internal representations (which is why companies are pouring money into llvm/clang). Imagine the bricks he would shit if emacs was a useful target for external compilers!
I didn't understand that part of the post, but also don't know much of the history here. Was Genera + Dynamic Windows running on these so-called "Lisp Machines", or was it in competition with the Lisp Machines?
And if Kent was such a big fan of Lisp, why was he writing "impossible do on Lisp Machines" programs in Teco? They could be written in Teco but not in Lisp?
One branch of Lisp Machines originated at the MIT: the CONS and CADR Lisp Machines. If Kent was at the MIT and was using Zmacs and ZMail, those ran on the CADR already. Lisp Machines from Symbolics, LMI and TI were later based on the hardware and software from the MIT, but they used new processors and the OS was extended. MIT stopped developing the CADR and bought the machines and software from TI and Symbolics, then.
Kent said that he implemented things in TECO that people thought were possible only on the Lisp Machine. Writing software on the Lisp Machine was usually easier than, say, in TECO.
> Lisp Machines from Symbolics, LMI and TI were later based on the hardware and software from the MIT, but they used new processors and the OS was extended.
Ok, after some more reading, I think I'm getting the picture. Genera was the OS on the Symbolics Lisp machines, and the MIT Lisp machines ran some other similar OS. Genera's roots though were in the code from MIT.
> Kent said that he implemented things in TECO that people thought were possible only on the Lisp Machine.
Right. I don't get this. If he's a fan of Lisp machines, why bother spending time implementing solutions to tough problems in TECO instead of whatever Lisp his Lisp machines were running?
Genera was Symbolics' marketing name for their proprietary fork of the Lisp Machine OS.
TECO was THE editor for years - on PDPs. Its macros look like line noise (if you know what I mean). Emacs was 'invented' as a bunch of Editor MACroS for TECO. Now comes a new generation of machines (personal workstations). Kent was young and tried to show them that with software written TECO could do stuff like Zmacs (the first Emacs written in Lisp) or Zmail (a Zmacs-based mail-reader). TECO died anyway. The Emacs for Multics was also written in Lisp and got popular among Multics users.
TECO was available for everyone who had access to a terminal that had some connection to a PDP (or similar). The Lisp Machine OS had this $100000 hardware dongle - the Lisp Machine.
> Right. I don't get this. If he's a fan of Lisp machines, why bother spending time implementing solutions to tough problems in TECO instead of whatever Lisp his Lisp machines were running?
Because he wasn't so big a fan of Lisp Machines that he didn't get annoyed by their fanboys. He's relating this annecdote to demonstrate that he is not sijmply a die-hard Lisp Machine afficianado who can't let go.
In one, you are essentially doing RPC: here's the input, do the operation and give me an output. In the other, you are remotely manipulating "documents". Even a command to act consists of emplacing a "request" and being redirected to a "response". You navigate between "documents" by following URLs in links.
To be honest, I like REST for CRUD of things that are natural resources, but I think it's wasted extra work for operations that are natural RPCs.
It is very easy to find pythonistas on python-list who are eager to tell you how wrong you are, or how you shouldn't even want to do <X> because it's not "pythonic".
I think Yegge was right, and that this is the main thing holding Python back.
That said, I still generally like the language itself.