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15:10:51
jackdaniel
many fields are prone to 'fashions', and 'making software modern' seems to be such thing
15:11:10
beach
The other thing that turned my mood bad today was that I have been writing to my local TV station to point out elementary errors in their way of doing arithmetic, and no answer for more than a week, and the error continues. Basically to determine by how much the day length changes, they first round sunrise and sunset for each of two consecutive days, then they subtract. So the error can be up to 2 minutes. And they don't blink when
15:11:13
jackdaniel
ironically older systems are often better from many points of view than their modern counterparts
15:12:35
beach
jackdaniel: Yes, people like "Uncle Bob" often point this out. Like what on earth do we need millions of lines of code for in an ordinary car.
15:14:22
beach
I mean the person presenting the forecast should have said "I know I reported +3 minutes yesterday, and +1 minute today, and I know that's absurd, but I didn't put together these numbers, so blame my colleague Bill."
15:15:03
splittist
beach: why should they be accurate in that one respect? (When they aren't in any other?) You could think of it in terms of consistency (ie. consistently wrong).
15:15:06
beach
Or, "I was told to report +3 minutes yesterday and +1 minute today, but I know for a fact that this is absurd, so I looked it up, and it is +2 minutes each day. So there!"
15:17:33
ck_
before this goes completely off the rails, I'd like to share one point of view with you. In Academia, some people may think the value of a certain degree (say a doctorate) is absolute and means a certain qualification for autonomous research for example.
15:18:11
ck_
This goes out the window as soon as you witness just one example of this not being the case at all, for whatever reason
15:19:17
ck_
As a result you might lose faith in the whole system; or, you can accept the fact that the academic label doesn't mean anything by itself, and instead look for people that also understand this
15:20:29
ck_
I think it's the same thing with your observation about the variable-increase-of-daylight-per-day. These things have existed since media exist, there are many examples of complete nonsense communicated with the air of absolute certainty by media
15:20:48
beach
I don't think I lost faith in the weather forecast, or else i wouldn't try to educate them.
15:21:28
ck_
your attempt at correcting this is very commendable but will (unfortunately, in my opinion) be fruitless for the same reason that the influx of "I have an idea for a new Common Lisp Standard for the 21 Century!!" will not stop
15:23:37
ck_
everything I've been saying was an attempt to brighten your mood. It could be so much worse... Sorry that I couldn't communicate my point more clearly
15:24:01
splittist
(I think I'm old enough to remember when Data Processing was a name for the whole field of endeavour.)
15:24:01
heisig
I try not to work myself up about "Next Generation CL" anymore. Most proponents of such a thing maintain zero implementations, so they will face the same fate as R6RS.
15:24:51
beach
ck_: Thanks! I am better already. I am going to take a break for a sauna. That usually fixes many things. Back in 20 minutes or so.
15:31:31
shka_
I think that the thought process of "libraries make programmers productive, so the best language is the one that makes libraries programming the quickest and easiest" is completely logical
16:03:59
jackdaniel
all that said, it would be cool if cl had (possibly optional) standardized protocols for threading, networking, unicode and (of course) mop; but it is not a pressing issue given all points are addressed by vendor modules
16:17:17
shka_
on the other hand, if cl had threading and networking from the day 0, it would likely be obsolete by now
21:45:42
no-defun-allowed
Re-reading the document, I wonder if they've investigated what assumptions the compiler writers make, and what is idiomatic Common Lisp.
21:46:53
no-defun-allowed
e.g one should basically never have to write SLOT-VALUE, so foo.bar syntactic sugar is just encouraging one to write bad code, and RAII (oh, why the hell are we suggesting RAII and manual memory management in the new standard now?) and continuations probably would not mix.
21:53:53
no-defun-allowed
We either already have "first-class macros", as you can grab the macro function and pass it around, like any old object, or by Matt Might's definition, it would be non-trivial to modify a compiler to implement them efficiently. And finalization is usually a last-ditch effort for handling remote resources; I wouldn't bother. And the high performance socket stuff is definitely _not_ using BSD sockets, so I hope we don't