[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Bob Kline]

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Robar Philip <philip.robar at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:03 PM, Bob Kline wrote:
>
>
> > The same with languages and compilers.
>
> (I will not start a language war. I will not start a language war. I will
> not… :-)
>
> So tools don’t matter? Really?
>

Not what was said.  The problem gets
to be that if one doesn't have a large
enough community of users a language
or tool doesn't have much broad effect,
commercially or technically.  Ada, the
first claimed attempt at a universal language
by the US military died because few learned
it. And it's beyond almost anyone to master
and remember the details of very many tools
and/or languages, so each one has to be
sufficiently useful to create a useful size
community of users.  This is certainly the
case if there's to be any economic impact.

>
> You might find Paul Graham’s, “Beating the Averages”, interesting reading.
> It’s a short article on how Graham and Robert Morris used Lisp in their
> startup, Viaweb, to outrace and out-innovate their competitors. (Viaweb was
> bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Stores*.) [
> http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html]
>

How many people use Lisp today?

>
> Also, if you follow this type of thing, you’ll have noticed that there’s
> been a marked increase in the use of functional programming in the
> commercial world over the last few years. (Think Lisp, Erlang, Haskel and
> Scala—particularly the latter.)
>

I'll take your word for the marked increase.
But my statement stands that tools have to
have broad use to have any staying power.
Others might come and go with a project.
The same with languages.  The same applies
to hardware.  DSP chips for example.  People
tend to stay with what they know, which creates
stability, but can delay the widespread use of
something usefully different.  Profoundly different
and useful is very rare.

>
> Programming languages do matter—if you’re smart enough to take advantage
> of them.
>

Somewhat tautological. Most people are
in fact not smart enough to be totally
flexible in many situations.  In their fantasies
maybe.  But from the standpoint of an industry,
you need enough people conversant in a tool
or language to get products and systems
designed, debugged, etc., in a timely and
economic fashion, with the end result having
a price of interest.  At the highest level, people
create significant new things.  Most of us don't.
At the highest levels, people don't always have
to be practical.  Most of us do.

    -- Bob


>
> Phil
>
>
> * Yahoo, of course, then proceeded to rewrite much of Yahoo Stores because
> they couldn’t hire enough smart people** to continue development in Lisp.
>
> ** The journey-person programmer thinks they understand C, but really
> doesn’t. (And let’s not get started on the nightmare that is C++.) On the
> other hand a language like Lisp in the hands of a true master can create
> things of exceeding beauty, complexity and reliability in a fraction of the
> time you could do them in C, if you could do them at all.
>
>
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