The Programming Language Conundrum - <AUTHOR> http://evrl.com/programming/2019/03/28/the-language-conundrum.html <comment><USER2> > A lot has been written about "hyperproductive teams". ... there's one thing > in common between all the stories I've heard and the successes experienced > first hand: small teams

Personally, I'd go one step further. It's small teams that were together from the start. Going through the initial setup of a project makes all the difference. When people come later, they lack the intuition that comes with being around when all the structural decisions were made. Early people make tradeoffs and bake good and bad practices into the pipeline, later people are told not to touch certain things because it's more complicated than it looks or will break something else that doesn't seem explicitly connected.

I've been on both sides of this fence. Having started a company and sold it - my partner and I were hyper productive, but while the small team that inherited the code is extremely capable, it took years longer to feel comfortable making big changes than it took to write.

Joining other people's projects and large codebases, on the other hand, has always taken a long time for me to be productive in. Typically it takes a year at a new company before I'm moderately useful.

Personally I don't think this has a ton to do with programming languages, even though I feel much more productive in python and javascript than C++ myself, even though I've been using C++ longer. I still suspect familiarity with the early decisions is a greater factor in productivity than language.

<comment><USER3> > It's small teams that were together from the start. Going through the > initial setup of a project makes all the difference. When people come later, > they lack the intuition that comes with being around when all the structural > decisions were made. Early people make tradeoffs and bake good and bad > practices into the pipeline, later people are told not to touch certain > things because it's more complicated than it looks or will break something > else that doesn't seem explicitly connected.

I've also seen this happen and agree with your analysis that it's probably not related to the programming language - it seems more like a problem with how the thought process behind those decisions is (not) recorded.

Short of making every project (and the codebase it results in) live for a short enough time to guarantee that nobody new will ever have to look at it, we've got to collectively do a better job of being able to explain the "wtf did you do that?!" aspect of development.

<comment><USER4> A readme (in plain language) in every folder helps a lot. Either that or it's replaying every commit from the start. Maybe tools can be made for this.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's about tools as much as culture - whether it's a readme, a wiki or a chat log that's not full of talk about the weather and scones (no, really), people have to be suitably incentivised to work that way. Something that isn't a customer-deliverable (they aren't going to directly care if you don't record the weird business process that led to you implementing feature X the way you did; they don't have a comparison which tells them that if it was recorded, changes could've been quicker/cheaper/less risky) is at risk of being cut as soon as there's a hint of time pressure to get something out the door.

It's coincidental that doing things in less of a "let's all get in a room and talk about it for 3 hours" way should make keeping remote workers in the loop easier too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the exact opposite experience going from working primarily with Java to Clojure. I worked with the former for nearly a decade, and I haven't contributed to a single library or project I used in that time. Every time I'd see a bug or a feature I'd like to add, I'd check the source see thousands of classes each with its own semantics and behaviors, and give up. The amount of effort needed to familiarize yourself with a non-trivial Java codebase is herculean.

Meanwhile, I've contributed to many Clojure libraries, and lots of people contributed to the ones I maintain. I can open a Clojure project and figure out what's going on much easier than with a Java one. The code tends to be much more direct. It's primarily written using pure functions that you can reason about independently. It's focused on the data, so I don't have to learn hidden behaviors. And I have a live environment with the REPL where I can run the code and see what it does immediately.

My team has been working with Clojure for nearly a decade now. We have many applications in production that have been developed and maintained for many years. We've hired many new devs during that time, and we've never had problems onboarding.

A language being expressive and flexible does not preclude it from scaling to large projects. And when the language is not expressive, you end up with huge amounts of incidental code because you're forced to map your problem domain to the language as opposed to the other way around.

I think that community practices for using the language are far more important. Clojure community started discouraging heavy use of macros early on, and a small set of common patterns tends to be used to solve problems, and codebases across projects tend to have a similar style to them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Even if there is a scaling limit, you can still use SmallTalk or a Lisp for small projects (and the scope of small projects in those languages is larger than that of, say, small Java projects) and benefit. I imagine plenty of unglamorous software projects are small enough in scope.

I am a mathematician, not a programmer, but even I have a Lisp story like this. I'm working with a computer science professor at my university who has in the past worked as a programmer both for private companies and for our government. We're studying some combinatorial game played on graphs and wanted experimental data of which player has a winning strategy on thousands of small graphs.

To feel more certain of the computer results we decided to each write our own implementation independently without looking at each other's code. He wrote his in C and I wrote mine in Common Lisp. You can imagine the punchline since it is similar to all of the Lisp stories out there: my program is about a tenth of the number of lines of code, took much less time to write and runs about twice as fast!

<comment><USER7> How would you know the projects stay small? Also, if you have to work on small and large projects, and one tool works for both, getting proficient in both tools might just not add enough benefit...

<comment><USER6> I certainly have no idea how to predict if a programming project will stay small, but maybe people who do that kind of thing for a living have some idea?

Also, I'm skeptical about this scaling limit business, but if it's true, call the first program a prototype or proof of concept and then rewrite in a "scalable" language when necessary. "Plan to throw one away, you will anyway."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Odd languages attract above average programmers, if nothing else than because they are engaged. Small teams are more productive than large teams, because there are almost no communication problems. I wonder how much is due to this?

<comment><USER9> I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I'll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It's the people, not the language.

<comment><USER10> No, the language is part of the equation.

I have code, for work, in: FoxPro, Delphi, Python, VB, VB.NET, C#, F#, Obj-C, Swift, Rust, Sql, Js.

I rewrite apps and codebases, and move them. I rewrite the same stuff many times, and make my own pseudo-ORM is my main thing when learn new languages.

Absolutely I'm more productive in some Langs than others:

Amazing at:

\- Fox, Delphi, Python (#1), F#, Swift

Average, low:

\- VB, C#, Obj-C, Js

Barely move:

\- Rust (this is my last lang, and also doing a programming language that I have sketch in python, swift, f#. The task hit against the hardest and weakest parts of rust).

I look at C, C++ and my instinct tell me I will suck forever at them. Same Haskell. Ocalm? I will fly. Lisp? Nope, that crazy stuff never click. Kdb+? I don't know, maybe.

I don't buy the meme "the language not matter, is the people" because languages are made FOR the people. And some stuff click on you or not.

That is the reason APL is a thing for some.

<comment><USER11> Whenever I hear "it might work for you, or not", my ears perk up. Not understanding when something works or not is a great question. It's something to explore. It's not the endgame.

I briefly studied French in college, and to say it "didn't click" would be an understatement. It was the worst grade I got in any class ever, by far. And yet, even the dumbest French person is fluent from when they were just a kid. It's probably not the case that French is simply impossible for some people to learn. Something else is going on.

Couldn't it be that we simply haven't figured out a good way to teach programming languages yet? Software is still generally "go read the reference manual online and you're good", but most other mature fields have moved beyond that. Boeing is in hot water this month in part because they essentially used that as pilot training for the 737 MAX, and it's clear to everyone that this is not an adequate way to learn a complex new technical tool.

Unlike you, I don't find Swift particularly productive (and I've written tens of thousands of lines in it!) -- but maybe with the right training, I would.

<comment><USER12> Learning a language as an adult is completely different from learning as a kid. Your hypothetical "dumbest French person" would not have been able to learn French as an adult, the same way that the most physically fit 100 year old could not survive the falls down the stairs that 3 year olds do without even crying.

<comment><USER13> Correct. A different part of the brain is used when learning a language past a certain age (I think 8 or 10 years old).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Create a language to solve your problem;

> Solve your problem.

When I worked on a complex framework in a small team, we used Objective-C. In the early days of the project, we created some powerful utility methods like map and reduce which we used extensively in the early stages. These methods let us do things like traverse complex structures very compactly. Way better than the more plodding while-loop (perhaps with a stack) way of doing it. But, I found myself moving away from these later in the project in favour of more verbose code because it took me too long to understand the map/reduce code if I needed to revisit it. The longer code was, um, longer, but it was much easier to understand what I (or my colleagues) had done when I came back to this code. In my view, a bunch of very smart programmers can indeed be "hyperproductive" using a language like Smalltalk, but this hyper-productivity may not survive the longer term life of the project.

<comment><USER15> How is map difficult to understand? It's the same semantics as a for loop with input and output lists, but less boilerplate.

<comment><USER16> From my personal experience, most developers that discover list comprehension etc. get excited about how much they can achieve with little code that they try to keep everything as small as possible. They end up using short, non- descriptive variable names and you need evaluate the code in your head to find out what a variable/list contains. It's even worse with non-sequential callbacks and closures.

<comment><USER13> In Python I went back and forth:

I discovered list comprehension and was exited and used them a lot. Then I went to multi level list comp. Then I realise I could never debug those so went back to loops for anything needing more than a single level. Finally I discovered Generator Expression which are basically like list comp, but lazy (not evaluated) and since then I break my code in a series of generator expression which I materialise at the end with a single list comprehension. This way I keep my code readable, it's a lot cleaner then a bunch of loops, and I also benefit of Python's special optimisation for list comprehension.

<comment><USER17> I like writing generator loops with the yield statement for more complex processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm skeptical for the simple reason that this post never calls out any specific feature of Lisp or Smalltalk which could cause this problem, and other languages which apparently don't suffer from these problems have most of the same features. It's almost as if unpopularity is the root cause.

Guy Steele famously said that with Java they "managed to drag a lot of [C++ programmers] about halfway to Lisp". I don't hear many complaints about Java being too 'organic' or difficult to document or that it only works on 2-pizza teams.

If you think that sufficiently powerful languages only work on small teams of dedicated people, why draw the line at Lisp/Smalltalk? Why aren't the Ada people going crazy about how loose and dynamic Java is, much less Python and Ruby -- all of which apparently "breeze through the 100, 200, 500 developer marks without much trouble"?

I remember reading about how Codd's relational databases struggled with acceptance because it was believed at the time that 'tables' were too complex for the average programmer, yet today that idea is laughable. People tend to rise to the level of expectation.

<comment><USER18> >other languages which apparently don't suffer from these problems have most of the same features

Well, one of the very first differences I think of between Lisp/smalltalk and Java is dynamic vs static typing. In Java, you have to write extra boilerplate code to satisfy the type system. This slows you down when you're writing code. However, when you're figuring out someone else's code, static types can be a big help. Often times, you can guess the right way to call a method based solely off the signature, and if pass the wrong thing, your IDE can highlight your mistake almost instantly.

So when you're working on your own freshly written code here and now, static typing is usually a hindrance. When you're working on 3 year old undocumented code written by someone you've never met, static typing is a key source of information on how things work. The bigger the team/project, the more likely it is you're working on code that's not familiar, so it would follow that static typing helps scalability.

<comment><USER19> I've started using type hints with python and they are amazing, not just for historic code, but improving my productivity in real time (especially in conjunction with an IDE). I think what's great is when you use hints, you get benefits in linting, but you can also get away from it when you need to. With mandatory types, you are always having to work in the type system. Best of both worlds. But not everyone is as excited about or as thoughough with them as I am.

<comment><USER20> I find type hinting to be very useful, but it has some gotchas (also present in unhinted Python), where the type you get isn't the type you expect:

\- Int and float from numpy arrays are np.int/float32/64\. And round(np.floatXX) returns a float, but round(float) returns an int in Python 3. \- ruamel.yaml loads CommentedMap and some custom scalar types. CommentedMap is not a subclass of dict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The fact that dozens of companies have been built around millions of lines of Common Lisp code at all levels of abstraction solving some of the most complicated problems is a testament to the scalability of Lisp.

What has changed is that most software shops aren't solving technical problems anymore. Most places are engaged in the business of plumbing—connect this database (whose problems are solved) to this dashboard (whose problems are solved)—but many of us don't want to admit it. It's not glamorous and Silicon Valley prefers to keep its death grip on titles like "Senior Solutions Architect." Plumbing doesn't necessarily need expressive power of a programming language, but I contend that problem-solving greatly benefits from it.

<comment><USER22> this hasn't really changed. Yesteryear it was Visual Basic, reviled by anyone coming from a Computer Science background. Most if it was "connect to database". Prior to that, 4GL's: dBase III derivatives, right through Microsoft's (eventually) FoxPro. Before that COBOL. There has always been "plumbing" for as long as computers have been "business machines".

<comment><USER21> I think the proportions have shifted significantly. (Proportion of "problem solving" to "plumbing".) There's at least a couple orders of magnitude more software and services available to use and connect to today than there was 25 years ago.

<comment><USER23> Plumbing is not what you read in your textbooks about.

It has always been the case that the majority of programmers are plumbers. As a fraction of people I would be surprised if we do not have more people working on blue skies problems today because all the tools are available for free, as opposed to the 80s when a workstation with the software on it cost 30% of the developers yearly salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-saleh I would say there are several languages that straddle the line.

AFAIK there exist 50+ people teams that use i.e. ocaml (Jane street, Facebook), haskell (gallois, Facebook, Google), erlang (whatsapp, pivotal)

I would say that beyond i.e. 10 developers you suddenly need to have onboarding solved. You need to be able to teach your new hires. You need to have community beyond your workgroup to ask questions. You need decent library support.

I would say it is beyond 50 where your leads start to worry you didn't `go with IBM` so to speak. You suddenly can't just hire an expert. And you can't coast on the fact your programmers find the language familliar.

Like, I joined 4 people team working in clojure. It was fine. You mostly could see "oh, this is where the macro magic starts, and here I need to grok protocols first and here I need to grok transducers first". Then my manager got nervous that he couldn't hire new people fast enough so we had to do a python rewrite :-/

Different team, different project, 60+ people, python. You'd think, it is just python. But you never know when there is a metaclass hiding behind an inheritance chain. There are parts, where we might have single person understand the code. Sometimes they left year ago.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't think the issue is that the language weaves with the mind (or the reverse). Instead I think there's several issues at play, at least these, and probably others: a) mindshare, b) dynamic type systems suck.

(b) alone may seem insufficient, since TFA mentions Python as a language that scales, but I've never seen large Python systems -- lots of small Python programs and libraries, yes, but monolythic multi-mloc Python applications? no. When you get to that size, dynamic typing issues become time sinks.

As to mindshare, if the number of developers who know Lisp is small, you're not going to get a lot of them. Mind you, you should be able to train them -- once you speak N>3 programming languages, getting to N+1 is not that difficult. But it's a lot easier to hire C++/Java/whatever programmers. This is a mindshare effect.

Also, if 1.5 FTEs allows you to build a successful company, then to scale development to 100 FTEs you have to rewrite, well, that's still a success. Many would like to have that problem. And nowadays we're getting good at incremental rewrites as an industry -- witness the Rust effort.

I think the future lies with Rust. Rust is a very high-level programming language, but it still lets you get down to the same low level as C. If you sold Rust as a Haskell w/ linear types, no/minimal monads, no I/O monad, and a C-ish syntax -basically, what it is-, I think TFA might run away saying "oh no, another Smalltalk that won't scale".

At the very least I'd like to think and hear a lot more about the issue -- whether and why some programming languages do or do not scale teams -- before accepting TFA's conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER25> "These languages are very powerful, but they don't scale. So even when you get ten times the productivity, the mostly tribal complexity will not scale beyond your "pizza-sized team" and therefore you now have a hard upper limit on your total software development capacity."

Ultimately, the problem boils down to the languages giving too much freedom. More conventional languages like Java can scale to a massive degree because they standardize so many things, which means that you can now share components which amplify your work. Lisp et al are cool toys and small team tools, but you're not going to see any large scale db libraries and parsers and concurrency libraries and web servers and cachers and HA systems that can interoperate with each other without a ton of shoehorning.

When every foreign chunk of code requires a ton of ramp up time just to figure out what it's doing and how you could even integrate it, or requires changing your IDE and workflow in ways incompatible with what you have already, you lose more than you gain.

Worse is better. Worse gives you interoperable, reusable, amplifiable components, in a common framework everyone understands.

<comment><USER26> > the languages giving too much freedom

This is why the D programming language doesn't have macros, neither text nor AST. It's been a controversial decision, and I've had trouble convincing people of the reasons why. Others explain it as "Walter doesn't like macros."

The reason is that macros enable one to invent one's own language withing the language, and that language is incomprehensible to others. It happens with every language that supports macros and macro-like constructs. (It happens with C++ "expression templates" and operator overloading.)

People swear up and down that they'd never use macros that way, they'd use them responsibly, and the incomprehensible mess they create is indeed responsible.

For a hilarious example, an engineer I know recounted a story at Big Corp where there was an aged piece of software written in assembler. The programmer for it had long since moved on. The code had some problems and needed updating. Unfortunately, the programmer had invented his own language using the macro system, and nobody wanted to touch it.

My engineer friend said he could do it, and had the code fixed in a couple hours. Amazed, the manager asked how he'd figured out those macros. He replied "I didn't. I assembled the code, ran it through a disassembler, converted that back to source code, then fixed it."

<comment><USER27> No experience with D, but using Go a lot, and it is the same thing there with lack of metaprogramming.

Turns out everyone uses reflection instead to get anything done.

Not sure how much of a success that is.

<comment><USER26> D fully embraces metaprogramming which is a very powerful part of D. But it stops short of being able to redefined the language, which is what macros do.

<comment><USER28> Do you consider e.g. BER MetaOCaml approach as "being able to redefine the language"?

<comment><USER26> I don't know enough about OCaml to have a non-gibberish reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am yet to see a team of 100 successfully working on the same problem. I've seen large codebases that solve lots of different problems with 100's of people working on it at the same time, but this isn't the same thing.

My point is, if you are on the second situation, you can very likely split your people into different teams, facing different trade-offs and with a formal (but not static) interface between their code. So if you can get a 10 people team with the productivity of a 100 people team, but unable to scale further, well, you will face the same problem on the 100 people team, and can apply the same kind of solution to both. The only difference is that you are saving 90 people.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think there's a really important aspect to this that the software industry needs to confront in order to mature.

To _some extent_ \- not completely, but at least partially, power and unmaintainability are two sides of the same coin. That is, it is exactly the same properties that allow your amazing macro to boil 15 dimensions of a problem down into a single beautiful one line piece of code that also make it an unacceptable liability that should never be allowed into a mature codebase [1]. Because if the macro didn't exhibit that amazing sublte complex behavior then it wouldn't be powerful. But exactly by doing that, it is now something that nobody new can understand.

There is also a fraction of the software "power" equation for which it is a win-win: more power equals less overall non-essential complexity in the system and the burden of propagating the associated knowledge is lower than what is saved.

However distinguishing the above two things is completely non-trivial and if you can't actually do that well you need to fall back on the side of avoiding overly powerful behaviors if you want to have an actual long term, large scale, maintainable outcome.

[1] Obviously this is an overreaching statement. But to a first approximation this is true and the exceptions by definition have to be rare.

<comment><USER31> I wonder what the difference is between a DSL in Lisp/Smalltalk and a framework or powerful library like React, Rails or Pandas as far as complexity and learning curves go. Is it that the frameworks and libraries are typically maintained outside the team, and if popular, are widely known?

<comment><USER32> > Is it that the frameworks and libraries are typically maintained outside the > team, and if popular, are widely known?

Pretty sure this is it. A framework developed in the company can be a horrible thing; and avoiding it may be politically impossible, because someone important has approved spending a ton of money on developing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The proposition that "custom development tooling doesn't scale" is very much news to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

All of them have custom programmable configuration stacks, meta languages for their environments, and custom application harness instructions.

So why don't those count as counterexamples? It seems like a just-so story.

<comment><USER34> Those companies are so high-profile, with so many people wanting to work for them, that they can do what they want, and the new hires will keep coming.

But in an obscure company, especially one that's not very well funded, it may make sense to use a blub language so the company can attract programmers that it can afford. Of course, using a less powerful language will limit the productivity of those programmers. But having two or three moderately productive programmers is probably better than being dependent on one bipolar [1] programmer.

[1]: [http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html](http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html)

<comment><USER33> ... My experience with those companies, and I've been employed by more than one: the decisions to make those special sauce systems predate their fame in every case.

So no, and I don't get why you're trying to now raft programming languages you don't like to a medical diagnosis.

<comment><USER34> Touché.

My reference for "bipolar" was an article written by someone who applied that term to programmers writing in a family of languages he _does_ like. His description might even apply to me. I've never done any serious Lisp hacking, but I wrote large amounts of code in Python and Lua, which are closer to Lisp than they are to, say, C. In truth, the second paragraph in my earlier comment was me thinking out loud on why it might have been a mistake for me to use those languages in the context where I did. Maybe it didn't belong in a reply to your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > These languages are very powerful, but they don't scale.

The problem, it seems to me is that software developers often think: "what programming language do we really like && can continue to use for $long_time over $scaling_of_business".

When this is the case, business management expectation problems emerge regarding costs, maintenance and timing when the business scales by 10 or 100x. Early phase teams are lambasted for making poor decisions - and "adult supervision" ( i hate that term ) is hired to "fix things".

Thing is, the early "poor decisions" may not have been poor decisions at all relative to the business needs. However, since costs and retooling issues weren't discussed and planned for - the early team look like a bunch of fools/amateurs.

As software developers, we need to understand and communicate that the tools can we use to accomplish the needs for the business at one stage are different than those of a later high-scale stage. its OK, completely natural, and a requirement if we want to keep our jobs and grow with the business.

analogy: If a specialty carpenter is designing and building high end furniture with a set of well made brand-name niche tools and techniques they wouldn't expect that those same tools would be used if sales take off and 10x or 100x the number of units need to be produced. It would be understood that retooling would be required, people with expertise in those tools be hire and that there would be new costs involved. Also, the carpenter who starts the business with small scale tools isn't lambasted for being an idiot for picking those tools in the early phases. It would be quite odd to suggest that that person have picked tools and hired people for 100x production when they were selling single digit units a year.

<comment><USER12> The question is what the intention was. A carpenter doing models for IKEA would be expected to design for million-unit volumes from the start.

<comment><USER35> different problems here - if the production and scale are already well known and understood - there are, arguably only design choices to be made that fit into the existing tooling.

"the new chair model must fit into these production constraints"

"the new software must be written to fit into this system - JVM based, web interface ..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> We are traveling down this road. We've implemented Clasp ([https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git](https://github.com/clasp- developers/clasp.git)) - an implementation of Common Lisp that interoperates with C++ and uses llvm as the backend. On top of this, we built Cando ([https://github.com/drmeister/cando.git](https://github.com/drmeister/cando.git)) - a computational chemistry programming environment for designing large molecules. The end of our story hasn't been written yet.

Clasp could be used for a lot of other things.

<comment><USER21> To add to cutting-edge (& open source) scientific applications, Rigetti Computing uses Common Lisp for their quantum optimizing compiler [1] and high- speed quantum simulator [2].

[1] [https://github.com/rigetti/quilc](https://github.com/rigetti/quilc)

[2] [https://github.com/rigetti/qvm](https://github.com/rigetti/qvm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The poster makes a point about conservatism in large companies, but doesn't explore this further. Its actually a more complicated matter than just technical ignorance in managers. The real problem is that programming languages are seen as a tactical matter for project managers ("just use the best one for the job"), whereas they should be considered strategic.

* At the start of a project the PM is given a budget and a timescale which were probably driven by the question "whats the earliest you can't prove you won't be done by?" There will be no slack for developers to spend 6 months coming up to speed on a new programming language and paradigm.

* Nor can the PM afford the career risk of trying something new. If you do it the standard way and it doesn't work, the decision to do it the standard way was obviously not responsible and the search for blame can be pushed elsewhere. But if you pick something novel and it doesn't work, the blame for any failure will always focus on the novel element. So there is a strong institutional pressure to keep doing things the same way to avoid the blame for failure.

* Once a piece of software is finished it has to be maintained. Most software expenditure actually goes on this phase. If you use a new programming language then you are going to have to keep a bunch of programmers around who speak that language just for that project, even if there are no changes needed this year. That is expensive, so this is another disincentive for trying a new language.

* Every technical manager has seen enthusiastic young programmers bearing some new silver bullet (see Fred Brooks) which, the youngster says, will solve all the problems at a stroke. After you have seen half a dozen of these they all start to look the same. There is also concern about "CV engineering": getting the company to take on the risk and cost of training employees in trendy technologies which won't provide real benefit but which will make those employees more likely to find a higher paid job somewhere else.

If programming languages were considered as a strategic matter then a large company could make a decision to invest in tooling, training and increased project risk in order to adopt a new language which would make them more productive in the long term. But until then change will be forced on the industry by small companies who beat the averages.

</comment><comment><USER38> I enjoyed the build up throughout the article to his conclusion. While I can't prove him wrong, a lot of very smart people came up with languages like Java and C# to solve these problems (ramp up, maintainability, retention, and more) as efficiently as possible. While I salute the author in his quest to be proven wrong, objectively, everything is a trade-off. I don't believe in better.

</comment><comment><USER39> The real problem is that there's a missing step:

      1. Create a language to solve your problem
      2. Solve your problem
      3. Document the language

Presuming that the original creators made a reasonable language for the problem at hand, who wouldn't want to use a powerful, well designed language with good fitness of purpose?

Now imagine that you were brought onto a team using a widespread (not homegrown) language you didn't know that was used for the company's main application, but you have no access to documentation.

<comment><USER40> I find that I almost never read documentation in languages like Common Lisp and Clojure for two reasons:

1) documentation is often unmaintained and reflects the state of the library at some point in time, but not the current API. But...

2) even when there is good documentation, it's often easier to just take a code example and then use the excellent jump to definition and other tooling to understand how the example works than it is to read the definition: in part, because there's always a repl available in these languages and it's much easier and quicker to run mini-experiments on the language at the repl than it is to read the documentation and translate it to code.

<comment><USER21> I think Lisp's "the source is the documentation" (with comments and doc strings) is a huge boon. I usually figure out how something works faster and more accurately than, say Ctrl+F'ing some Python Sphinx documentation.

<comment><USER41> >I think Lisp's "the source is the documentation" (with comments and doc strings) is a huge boon.

True.

At first i thought "Damn, there is little documentation on those Lisp libraries", but as the months passed, I understood that often code was very readable, and the fact that documentation strings are integral to the language is also a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > My theory, completely made up and untested, is that these powerful > Lisp/Smalltalk systems weave code and brains together in a way that > amplifies both. It's very organic, very hard to document, and thus it > becomes very hard to absorb new brains into the system. <

Here's a simpler and less mystical theory. These programming systems are fundamentally image-based, and much of their leverage comes from the coder's ability to leverage all aspects of the meta-system. However, the more the core image is evolved the easier it is for a team to get out of sync. This is the ultimate namespace clash.

A slew of other highly-productive languages share this feature, e.g., APL and Forth.

</comment><comment><USER43> Are teams using these languages small because the language doesn't scale well or because you don't actually need more developers?

</comment><comment><USER44> > 1\. Create a language to solve your problem;

> 2\. Solve your problem.

But don't we do this in every language, at least if we're doing a good job?

I remember the final "exam" of my high school CS class. It was mostly an in- class programming exercise in Pascal.

I was the only one to finish in less than the allotted time. The first one to finish after me did so after the _second_ extension period.

I have to admit while I was obviously inordinately pleased with myself, I was also baffled, because the other people in the class were certainly just as smart as I was.

So what was the difference?

The problem we were given was to draw a bunch of boxes with character graphics with contents and some overlap. Not really hard. Everybody else coded up each box individually with straight code. One after the other. Each time having the handle all the edge cases (literally).

I was the only one who first created a procedure (or set of procedures) for box drawing, and then used those procedures to draw the boxes. And yes, that is very much a simple "language" for solving the problem. Of course the language set some pretty tight limits on how your "language" could look, which is a bane for expression and a boon for understanding.

So I did "define the language, solve the problem in that language". In Pascal. Classic bottom-up programming.

So I dispute that there is a _fundamental_ difference, though there definitely is a significant difference in degree. The difference with high-power languages is that they allow us to apply this much more broadly, whereas with other languages you often run into technical limitations that prevent you from really defining the right language.

With there not being a fundamental difference, I also don't buy that we have a fundamental, unbridgeable divide/chasm/whatever, with these high-power languages with their problems on one side and the "blub" languages with their other problems on the other. Rather, let's explore that regions of the language space and see if we can't narrow the gap.

<comment><USER45> "But don't we do this in every language, at least if we're doing a good job?"

There is a difference between expressing higher level abstractions _using_ a language and actually _morphing_ your language in way that you can directly express those abstractions in it.

The latter is often impossible, if not because of technical limitations, but rather due to cultural barriers. If it was only once or twice when I worked in a team where stepping off the official language syntax dogma was considered a punishable crime. I've seen things as innocent as "from x import y" (in Python) being discouraged, and even using the dict function instead of {}.

People don't generally feel happy about seeing unfamiliar things in what they consider their comfort zone. I don't know what to do about it.

<comment><USER44> Boy is that ever the case! The lengths people will discuss spacing after method declarations, while being completely ignorant of the architectural issues that are rotting their code-base.

> comfort zone

Tentative essay title: _Can Programmers be Liberated from the Gentle Tyranny of Call /Return?_

> actually morphing your language

Yes. And no. First let's have a look at what "morphing the language" means, by way of natural language. When we use natural languages, we can mostly adequately describe anything we want to using the mechanisms available. Sometimes, we need a new vocabulary, sometimes a set of interlocking vocabulary, i.e. _jargon_. I haven't really seen a case where we need to tinker with the structure of the language, with the grammar.

When we add a function, set of functions, interlocking objects/methods etc. I would say that we are also adding vocabulary. And that _should_ be sufficient. The fact that it is not sufficient to me suggests that our fundamental "grammar" (not grammar of the surface syntax) is insufficient, not that we need to be able to make up grammar on the spot every time.

Of course making up grammar on the spot also solves the original problem, but it does lead to all these follow-on problems. One being that making up grammar on-the-spot is much more complex than just adding vocabulary, and so you are likely to get it horribly wrong. The other being comprehensibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The idea is pretty simple: concise languages ( like python, smalltalk etc.) work well when you can get away with being concise. Verbose languages ( like the C family ) work well when you can't. It only takes a couple of tries writing a project that favors verbosity in a concise language before this becomes apparent.

<comment><USER47> Languages like С allow you to control more (low-level) aspects of a program than languages like Ruby. Ruby is only concise because it handles tons of things for you, the way it sees fit.

You can make C++ quite concise, or quite verbose, depending on the level of detail you can hide under layers of abstractions.

It's much like the framework vs set of libraries: a framework allows you to write very little and produce a lot when all you're doing is wiring together existing pieces and write business logic code it the slots provided for that. Similarly Ruby allows you to write much lass than C if all you're doing is wiring together hashtables of hastables of hashtables, and rely on garbage collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > So why aren't we all using either of these two languages?

because $bigcorp's dreams with languages such as Java was not to be incredibly productive, but to be able to fire a whole team, hire replacements, and have them be more-or-less productive on day 1. Can't do that if every project lives in its own DSL.

<comment><USER11> Even in a lower-level language, is it possible to be productive on day 1? Instead of learning an explicit DSL, you're learning an implicit one spread across 10 or 100 times as much code.

Imagine if regexes didn't exist, and you showed up at a new company and they had hundreds of lines of Java for every little string matching function. Would anyone find that more productive? Even if regexes were never used outside of that one project, I think they'd be a huge win.

Especially at a bigco. My experience is you spend a while just getting all your accounts set up. Half the time, I haven't even known the programming language they used, so I spend weeks/months ramping up on that, even though it's not domain-specific. Spending a couple days learning a new DSL is just rounding error.

<comment><USER48> I'm not saying that this idea is grounded in reality :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I put a reaction on the site of the writer of the blog, but it looks like he removed it. So I'll repeat here. The text misses structure, clearness and the writer makes the same assumpion as Paul Graham, namely that a programmer thinks in the programming language he uses. To start with the last: "to write a good program, we need to think above the code level. Programmers spend a lot of time thinking about how to code, and many coding methods have been proposed: test-driven development, agile programming, and so on. But if the only sorting algorithm a programmer knows is bubble sort, no such method will produce code that sorts in O(n log n) time. Nor will it turn an overly complex conception of how a program should work into simple, easy to maintain code. We need to understand our programming task at a higher level before we start writing code. [..] There are two things I specify about programs: what they do and how they do it. Often, the hard part of writing a piece of code is figuring out what it should do. Once we understand that, coding is easy." (Leslie Lamport, [https://archive.li/2zZKy](https://archive.li/2zZKy)). Sentences in de Groot's blog like "these powerful Lisp/Smalltalk systems weave code and brains together in a way that amplifies both." are incomprehensible. The question at the end of the blog looks rhetorical to me "I think I'll end while hoping that someone out there on planet Earth reads this and proves me wrong :)". It is not clear what should be proved wrong, I suspect the writer is satisfied with his musings.

</comment><comment><USER50> > A lot has been written about "hyperproductive teams". ... there's one thing > in common between all the stories I've heard and the successes experienced > first hand: small teams

Funny because I don't think its small teams or a particular programming language that leads to great productivity. You don't have to look very far or far back to see teams, of various sizes, pulling off some amazing stuff with assembler and C. The key to productivity is a lot simpler, and independent of software development. Its a sense of responsibility, interest, and dedication.

In a small team that is using small talk the responsibility might come from being on a small team with a lot of lifting to do, the interest might come from having fun using a language that you like (regardless of the language), and the dedication might come from the promise of getting in early on a promising venture - hence the small team. All of these things add up to hyper- production.

If you can establish those three things, somehow, with a large team I don't see why hyper-production can't be achieved. Unfortunately modern project management for large teams seems to rely heavily on techniques that rob developers of all three qualities mentioned above in the name of so called "agile" and in pursuit of some fictitious software assembly line.

</comment><comment><USER51> I agree with the OP. This has been called the Lisp Curse elsewhere. Over time, your codebase becomes so high-level, full of advanced, domain-centric abstractions that basically alienates everyone else from effectively working on the project.

If you have a small, stable team that such issue might be relatively easy to overcome. But with bigger teams, with higher turnover, than it might totally cancel out any technical advantage gained from using such non-mainstream programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think what really makes those languages/teams productive is iteration time being low. Part of that is a natural consequence of small teams and lack of legacy code but certain languages definitely encourage it more than others. If you have fast iteration times you can really quickly figure out a system by experimenting, or work through bad ideas on the way to good ones.

For whatever reason software developers always seem to undervalue fast iteration times, and the less productive languages always seem to make iterating quickly harder, whether it's C++s ghastly compilation times and lack of an ABI making it hard to integrate libraries, or Java's interdependent class based nature causing excessive mocking and/or lots of generally unrelated state being required to have a working object to test with. In contrast smalltalk lets you just highlight a chunk of code and run it, and the lack of separation between runtime and ide generally means you have enough of the system live for things to work. I think where smalltalk doesn't scale is it can't easily take advantage of things invented outside of it because it's so integrated and practically its own OS

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm not sure I buy this: I recently had to write a bit of ruby (an omniauth strategy for my company's OAuth2 server) and the code I encountered there (as well as in the various rails projects I've worked on) may as well have been written in macro-heavy lisp: in fact, lisp or smalltalk would be preferable because they would have good source navigation tools for the macros, such as a stepping macro-expander.

<comment><USER31> Ruby supports a lot of metaprogramming, and some libraries and frameworks take advantage of that. It's not the best counter example to Lisp/Smalltalk.

<comment><USER40> My point is that a fairly popular platform that large teams use has nearly as much metaprogramming in its widely used libraries as any Lisp or Smalltalk codebase I've seen. So, I don't think that the tendency of Lisp programs to evolve DSLs is incompatible with large teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's a very good insight here on large/small teams.

Although I typically hate discussions of "programming languages are like human languages" I think it's the key here. All the team members need to share _and be comfortable in_ not just a spoken language, but the teams local jargon, and the programming language in use (including your team-specific conventions, which form a kind of jargon too). So teams in these esoteric languages (and I say this as a Lisp hacker myself) tend to be by definition small, have a lot of cultural overlap, and can be hyper-effective. And small teams _can be_ hyper productive/effective because of the lack of coordination overhead and because it's easier to have a high 1st derivative from a small starting point (in other words: no large team can beat a small team in efficacy/person, but small teams can't do everything).

That only answers half the problem; the other is: well if small team X can beat small team Y in significant part because of the choice of tools, why don't bigger teams use the same tools?

There's no easy answer. One is power: Lisp and C++ have too many degrees of freedom so it's easier to get in to trouble with languages with fewer "guard rails". This was an explicit design criterion for Go BTW: new grads are coming here and screwing up, so let's make it hard for them to make the most common/dangerous mistakes.

Second in the case of Lisp: it wasn't considered a deployment language as many of the things that made is powerful (e.g. GC, lambda, dispatch, dynamic polymorphism) were considered too expensive at a time when C and smaller machines were taking off. Now many of those features are considered mainstream in other languages, while the Lisp community itself therefore attracted people who were more power users.

C++ had a driver (Windows) and an impetus (like Go's: C gets you into a lot of trouble) but even then people looked for easier / safer languages (e.g. Java, an explicit reaction to ++)

</comment><comment><USER54> > I can recite many of such stories; of people keeping up with their ten > person team by coding whatever the team did during the day in 2-3 hours at > night using Squeak Smalltalk; about an old Lisp hacker working in a research > setup with mostly Java colleagues and always estimating to need 10% of the > time (and then actually making the estimate). So why aren't we all using > either of these two languages?

Maybe it isn't about the language, primarily, but about the team? Maybe those super productive teams would have been successful with any language that gave them enough freedom?

That would also explain why you can't switch your 20 Java developers to Smalltalk, and have them perform miracles of software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe this is part of the benefit of the whole micro-service trend? I've largely dismissed the idea until now as impractical in many cases, but this seems like a case where a team of between three and six developers could work in something like lisp (that may not scale well), expose an api, and communicate with other parts.

It seems like we really need cross-language oop for this reason. MS COM might be an example. I was reading something I clicked on yesterday when doing some reading about reference counting, and someone commented that things like MS Office (COM based) needed such things: something could be initialized in one language, passed to another, and deinitialized in a third.

<comment><USER56> > Hmm, maybe this is part of the benefit of the whole micro-service trend?

I think micro-services can actually make this worse.

The issue is that the early coders write macros and other tooling that makes it harder for future coders to understand. In other words, they develop their own service-specific language.

With one big service, you would expect a somewhat consistent set of practices. So, one language for the entire service.

With micro-services you can have a different language for each service. Worse, each language might be only slightly different.

If you end up with a consistent language across all of your micro-services, then you're back to the original problem.

(I've experienced this effect first-hand. If I'm not disciplined I'll do a bunch of meta programming that makes me _way_ more productive, but makes it much harder for another programmer to understand.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> One downside of Lisp and Smalltalk for large projects may be that there is no official mechanism for declaring types and interfaces. Even if you can adopt your own conventions for implying the types they are just your convention and other programmers might have difficulty grokking and trusting them.

Hyper-productive languages may be hyper-productive just because they use dynamic typing and static types may be better for creating a large piece of software by many programmers evolving over years hopefully decades.

<comment><USER58> Ever heard of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System? It has 'classes', 'generic functions' with 'methods' which support multiple dispatch over classes, etc. It was defined in the late 80s and integrating it into Common Lisp made it the first standardized OO language.

       (defclass person ()
         ((name        :type string)
          (age         :type (integer 0 150))
          (exployed-by :type company)))

       (defmethod rename-person ((p person)
                                 (old-name string)
                                 (new-name string))
        ...)

       (rename-person some-person "Jim" "James")

<comment><USER57> I've heard of it but not used. Being able to say: "(name :type string)" looks great.

Does it mean the system gives me an error if a method is called with a number where a string was declared to be the argument type?

<comment><USER58> At runtime every CLOS implementation will do that. Note that it allows for more than one parameter to be specialized. In the example FOO is using multiple dispatch with two parameters P and S. When we call FOO with arguments for which no method exists we get:

      CL-USER 22 > (defclass person ()
                     ((name        :type string)
                      (age         :type (integer 0 150))
                      (exployed-by :type company)))
      #<STANDARD-CLASS PERSON 4210214F63>

      CL-USER 23 > (defmethod foo ((p person) (s string))
                     (list p s))
      #<STANDARD-METHOD FOO NIL (PERSON STRING) 402025C653>

      CL-USER 24 > (foo (make-instance 'person) 3)

      Error: No applicable methods for #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION FOO 4060000B5C> with args (#<PERSON 402025F1DB> 3)
        1 (continue) Call #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION FOO 4060000B5C> again
        2 (abort) Return to top loop level 0.

      Type :b for backtrace or :c <option number> to proceed.
      Type :bug-form "<subject>" for a bug report template or :? for other options.

      CL-USER 25 : 1 >

<comment><USER41> Note to galaxylogic: When lispm wrote:

         (defmethod foo ((p person) (s string))
                         (list p s))

He was implicitly defining a "generic function" "foo" of two arguments.

Defmethod was defining an implementation of the generic function foo for arguments person with string.

One could later put something like:

         (defmethod foo ((p person) (p person))
                         (send-greeting p p))

And thus define a "foo" that works on two persons, etc.

CLOS allows specializing not just on classes, but also on specific instances, so some method applies only for a specific instance. For example a "foo" that applies only to a particular "important" person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't buy that the "privilege" of

> 1\. Create a language to solve your problem; > 2\. Solve your problem.

belongs mainly to Lisp and Smalltalk. Each time you define a method or a class (C#, Java, C++), you're extending and defining your "language".

I'm the leader of a 2.5-developer startup, we use C++, Java and C# for different purposes, and I have not once thought "shit, we'd be so much more productive if we used XXX instead of C# or Java" (C++ being the exception). Because the real problems are around the business domain. Understanding customer needs, wrapping our heads around Azure AD, etc, etc, etc.

The programming language has ZILCH to do with our challenges and I do not feel hampered by PL during refactoring either -- thanks to static types.

I have some regrets, and these go against frameworks we decided to use (EFCore, i.e., ORM, being the biggest regret of mine).

Programming language? Almost not a factor. I'm happy with all of the 3 we use, though I'm least productive in C++ due to the amount of ceremony needed -- header/implementation files, linkage, fixing preprocessor mess by variations of PIMPL (looking at you windows.h), slow compilation, etc, etc, etc.

If anything is indispensable for our productivity, it's a good ide and becoming comfortable with its capabilities.

<comment><USER60> When you have a good language, you don't need a good IDE.

<comment><USER61> This is like saying that if you have sharp nails you do not need a hammer. (IDEs can be, and are, extremely helpful; even simple text editors like _nano_ or _SciTE_ try to include some of the features normally found in an IDE.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I think the small team aspect is far more important than anything else. With two developers in a startup, you can split up key components and have quick informal talks concerning design choices. In a real company, huge amounts of time are wasted on all-staff meetings, team meetings, 1:1 meetings, management fads, mandatory compliance trainings that come up quarterly and take hours, and the sheer human problem of coordinating that many people. Big companies have huge waste stemming from many different areas. For example, at a large company they have people in charge of requirements that have no understanding of the domain or how to write software. It's like the telephone game you get as a kid where the message completely changes by the time it gets around the circle. Of course you could have your devs do that job, but most companies simply aren't that logical. I bet Paul Graham and another competent developer could use a language that is not considered to be very productive (Ex: C++) and still swim circles past a large IBM team that is being held down by it's own weight.

<comment><USER34> > mandatory compliance trainings that come up quarterly and take hours

Compliance has a bad name because it's bureaucratic. But in software, compliance can cover important things like privacy, security, internationalization, and accessibility. Getting these things right is a moral imperative in many cases. For this reason, the rise of move-fast-and-break- things startups, with their developers unfettered by bureaucracy, worries me.

<comment><USER62> I'll agree that there is likely some value (usually CYA for the company) and some real value too. However, those things still take up significant time that the two-person startup doesn't have to worry about and that is just one class of time wasters for big companies. It's always something: A big day-long network outage, firedrills, performance reviews, management shakeups, water cooler gossip, sending emails, reading emails, sudden surprise requests from executives, having to have IT install something as they took away admin rights, preparing for audits and disaster recovery...etc. I bet a startup could easily avoid 30% of the work which just comes with having 100-1000 people in an organization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The root issue is extensibility. The same sort of arguments come up with the simplest extensible language: Forth. There are whole categories of embedded applications where Forth can cut the development time down to a fraction of what it would take to do it in C. Once that programmer leaves it takes a long time for someone else to come up to speed to do the sort of simple modifications that such applications tend to require.

... and where do you get a programmer that can do anything effective with an extensible language anyway? Such people tend to be very good programmers in general and are rare and expensive.

</comment><comment><USER64> "(and do not forget: they are that powerful)"

Are they? Because small teams are naturally much more productive, I thought that was going to be the 'aha' of the article.

<comment><USER65> Yeah, I was expecting something along the lines of the old saw "what a team of two programmers can do in two weeks, a team of six programmers can do in three months".

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Could it be that these languages haven't evolved all of the tooling and ecosystems other languages have? You don't spend time setting up stuff. With web dev, you constantly spend time switching between various tools to just even build the damn thing/app.

None of it is _needed_ , per se - for years everybody made web sites without it - but we've all convinced each other that it's just what you do.

Maybe Smalltalk doesn't have these conventions (yet)?

</comment><comment><USER67> > It's very organic, very hard to document, and thus it becomes very hard to > absorb new brains into the system.

I think they way out is [something like] Alan Kay's "active documents". If you really need large teams (rather than communicating constellations of small teams, say) then your software has to be structured to be communicable. (Beyond Knuth's "literate programming" even, I think.)

</comment><comment><USER68> Sounds like language oriented programming: [https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/La...](https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/Language_Oriented_Programming.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER69> > Create a language to solve your problem;

> Solve your problem.

But a typical problem consists of multiple sub-problems. Are you going to create a new language for each of them?

</comment><comment><USER70> I think it really comes down to the availability of training material.

Look at the amount of material for Python compared to say SmallTalk

</comment><comment><USER71> you're given a $10M budget to solve a problem so you write it in Lisp and keep all the money.

Break this absurdity in any number of ways and see. Tech, business, people etc.

</comment><comment><USER72> There is more than one way to do it. Or, only one: Perl.</comment>


Ask HN: Aside from Emacs/Clojure, how/why do you use Lisp? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in learning what sort of problems are being solved "in the wild" with Lisp dialects–if Emacs Lisp and Clojure are removed from consideration—and why you choose a particular variant?<p>While Racket is an obviously popular dialect (and I'd love to hear what you're doing with it if that's your poison), I'm particularly interested in how Common Lisp, Scheme, or other Lisp dialects are being utilized these days. <comment><USER2> A few uses of Racket: [https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki/Friends-of- Racket](https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki/Friends-of-Racket)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Racket for small internal web site for the T.A. in my university (about 500 users).</comment>


Ask HN: Am I screwed if I don't get accepted to a top CS school like Stanford? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a high school senior. I've done web development since I was 13, released an iPhone app at age 15, and continue to have aspirations to start my own company someday.
However, I'm only really good at what I'm interested in, but not much else- my HS GPA is only a 3.8, and my SAT's hover around 2100.
The statistics are really depressing- I feel like I'd be a perfect fit for a school like Stanford or Carnegie Mellon, but chances are I won't get accepted.
Is all lost if I don't get into an renowned school for CS? Will VC's take one look at me and laugh once they find out I didn't graduate from Harvard? Are there any stories of HNers who've been successful without the Stanford degree?
Thanks guys, I love this community and I'm glad to be a part of it. <comment><USER2> Yes, they will laugh at you the minute you walk in front of them without a degree from a prestigious school.

While a great school will open doors, actually doing something will open more. So no, you aren't screwed, unless you plan on spending the next four years sitting on your ass like a bump on a log.

</comment><comment><USER3> Other posters have emphasized the apparent declining value of college. I agree with their positions, but I would like to emphasize that college isn't so much about becoming a better programmer as it is about gaining deep knowledge in an _academic_ area (not practical), broadening your knowledge (something you should do if you're only good at programming), a very particular and magical social setting that you will only have access to for 4-5 years after the age of 18 (you never get those years back and if you spend them working, then you missed a chance to have a _unique_ experience. You will be working your whole life. You can only go to college for the first time once.)

Studying an academic discipline may seem pointless to you, and that's fine, but if you do decide to go to college, I would recommend that you see it more as a luxury than a means to an end. Try to geek out and enjoy yourself, purely intellectual pursuits are one of the main reasons for living in this world.

Two other perks of university:

(1) if you get into a good one, people will be more likely to respect your opinion. By good one I mean name brand: Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, etc. This is perhaps an unfortunate artifact of the transition from a more stratified society to (an even more stratified) meritocracy that may disappear in our lifetimes, but it's very much the case now.

(2) you will learn how to write better. This is super important.

All that said, there's no reason to go into 100-200k of debt. I managed to get out of university with no debt thanks to inexpensive tuition in Canada, but I promise you that university is not worth 10-30 years of wage slavery.

</comment><comment><USER4> Paul Graham has written an essay about this:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> If you love this community, I'm surprised you missed all the recent top-voted "unschooling" articles claiming that college isn't even a worthwhile investment anymore, and/or saying that starting a business is a better education for entrepreneurs.

There are a ton of successful tech people in the valley that don't have more than a high school diploma.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only winner is the bank that loans you money.</comment>


Show HN: The Horde – Music Groovebox and Remixer - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/raver1975/horde <comment><USER2> That's impressive! The video got my attention immediately:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjkpVbbDtMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjkpVbbDtMY)

> Grab a track from spotify, split into stem files, and then chop it up.

I'm guessing the "AI" plays a role in determining the tempo, vocal/instrument layers, where to chop up the beats.

The first few minutes of the video demonstrates how practical the application is, to drag a file/URL(?) in and start looping, mixing and matching.

It reminds me a bit of Ableton, with their automatic detection and marking of "beats" (amplitude peaks?).

I'd be curious to learn more about the technical aspects. For example, the readme says both Java and Python are required - but I didn't see any Python code in there. I suppose it's bundling an external library, probably for machine learning. I do see Java functions for training models - I wonder what datasets were used, what musical asepcts the pattern recognition works on.

The feature set is extensive, with synthesizers (like TB-303/808/909), sampler, live sessions, record/export - I can see it's a long-term project built up over years. Nice work!</comment>


An Expat Has Time to Reflect, Now That the Party's Over - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/05/25/an-expat-has-time-to-reflect-now-that-the-partys-over/ <comment><USER2> I'd say welcome to China, but let's be realistic. America offers plenty of opportunities to get locked up for 24 hours for breaking selectively enforced laws (protest anything lately?) and then perhaps even worse for resisting arrest.

<comment><USER3> In Missouri you get fined for having mismatched blinds, and not having money to pay that fine will get you into court/ private prison.

<comment><USER4> Is that enforced at all? Regularly?

<comment><USER5> No

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one bothered by an American writer using the term "expat" to describe himself and other foreigners in a country, when the standard term used for the counterpart people in America is "immigrant" or "migrant worker"? American dialogue has been building a language of discrimination that I find extremely insulting as a non-US national in America, which spawns the whole anti-"immigrant" sentiment dominant in America.

<comment><USER7> Expat is typically someone who is sent to work for a company's foreign offices/overseas offices and who will return to their home country after their "tour" is over. I.e. their residency depends on their company's sponsorship --the company you work for is doing all the paperwork and paying all incidental costs for you.

An immigrant is someone who moves overseas or to a foreign country on their own accord without the help of a company. You're getting visas and residency on your own.

So for example, a Kiwi working on the production lines in Toyota city is likely an immigrant. A Kiwi manager in finance in Toyoda city is likely an ex- pat. It's also likely these two don't run in the same circles.

<comment><USER8> Your definition is not correct, or at least it's incomplete.

There are many retirees who call themselves an "expat", such as those at [http://money.cnn.com/gallery/retirement/2014/10/14/expat- ret...](http://money.cnn.com/gallery/retirement/2014/10/14/expat- retirement/index.html) .

Arthur C. Clarke was a British expat in Sri Lanka. He was not sent there by a company.

Here's the owner of a company which hires Mexican agricultural workers for 10 months of the year - [http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-guest- worker-20130331-dt...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-guest- worker-20130331-dto-htmlstory.html) :

> He spends $1,000 per worker for visas, consulate fees and transportation to > North Carolina. He's required to pay for their housing, and he estimates he > has spent more than $80,000 building a house on his property, plus $36,000 > to buy a mobile home and $5,000 a year to rent an apartment for the 48 > workers he employs during the growing season. The government makes him pay > them $9.68 an hour, which is about one-third higher than the minimum wage in > the state, and he spends thousands of dollars on workers' compensation > insurance.

Oddly, people rarely call those Mexican's "ex-pats." The only difference from your definition is that they work outside, and not in an office, no?

If so, isn't that the sort of socioeconomic class discrimination that keerthiko pointed out?

<comment><USER7> There are definitely some social strata connotations to it. Migrant workers, who often have visas pre-arranged for them and are given housing, are typically called migrant workers because they do "rounds". Conversely the Mexican workers at the Mexican consulate would be Mexican ex-pats and so would Cemex workers sent by the company to their US offices.

As I mentioned above, ex-pats and immigrants from country A living and working in country B typically will not be found in the same social circles --be they American or British or Brazilian or Chinese.

<comment><USER8> And like keerthiko, I am disturbed by the easy acceptance of this distinction.

The example I mentioned was not a migrant worker doing "rounds". It was under an H-2A agricultural visa to work for a single company in North Carolina. Is that specific Mexican, Rodolfo Benito Coy Garcia, an ex-pat? It sounds like your answer is "no, because he isn't in the right social circles."

I say, if someone's on a 5-year rotation in London, call them a guest worker. That's what they are. Why do you think we should maintain the class distinction in calling people from the more economically advantaged social circles to be "expats", while those from others are "guest workers" or "migrant workers" or other less socially accepted terms?

I'll again point out that your definition excludes all the other people who call themselves "expats", who live more or less permanently in another country, and are self-employed or retired. But who just happen to be from a rich country, and seemingly don't want to be called an "immigrant".

<comment><USER7> People self-label all the time. Retirees are one of them. I wouldn't normally call them ex-pats, but if that's what they want to call themselves, I don't care. Same for migrant workers. They can call themselves ex-pats too, if they like. That said, poor immigrants will rarely mix with the less poor immigrants from the same country, regardless of nationality --for the most part.

To me, and not everyone has to agree, colloquially an ex-pat is someone sent to work abroad by their company where the company pays incidentals, COLA, and does the visa legwork.

<comment><USER8> Yes, This is all about self-labeling as I don't think there are any laws which cover what "ex-pat" means. At that level I'm pointing out that your definition is only a partial fit to the existing use.

The underlying question I have is, _why_ do some people want to self-label as "ex-pat"? Why not use "guest worker" or "immigrant"?

Personally, I think the term ex-pat became in vogue post-WWI when rich Americans and (poor) artists and writers were part of the European social scene, like Gertude Stein's "Lost Generation". The modern self-employed authors and artists who live overseas still use that term.

After WWII, when US companies started to have European offices, and when it was cheaper and easier for US citizens to work overseas, they re-used the term "expat", in part for the romantic ties to the stories they read while growing up. Since business makes a lot more money than writing, that new term has come to dominate.

And these American guest workers, like British guest workers in China, India, etc., considered themselves better than other guest workers, so preferred the term "expat" over "guest worker." Then, to make it easy to tell the two apart, insist that the term "expat" is the correct one to use for office workers. And it just happens that guest workers in multinational business offices are mostly drawn from white people in rich countries.

I think US and British retirees living overseas call themselves "expats" for similar reasons; to consider themselves apart and above immigrants from poorer countries.

I believe your observations are consistent with my belief that the distinction is based on class terms. If so, by using that term don't you support classism? Of course, as the beneficiary of classism your answer might well be "yes".

<comment><USER7> I don't support classicism --and occasionally recoil from it. But I also see the same people decrying classism decry "ugly [Americans]" \--which is an interesting juxta. That said, I don't feel I need to proscribe usage. People can call themselves what they like and may label as they choose. This attitude may further classism, but to me it's a better alternative than telling people who they are or should think they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Im not sure i understand why this is a big deal. As the guy said, it was designed to send a message. As far as drugs, youd have to be insane to do drugs in china. The laws on drugs are really harsh. As for the reason, presumably the organizer hadnt paid the right bribes.

<comment><USER10> The issue is laws in China are arbitrarily enforced, making it easier to abuse power. Casual reading of this felt like the organizers were getting too successful and failed to pay the proper people. This was a message to them, not the partygoers. Next time pay us and we won't harass your guests.

<comment><USER11> The US is obviously somewhat better at non-arbitrary enforcement than China, but _Three Felonies a Day_ ought to be mandatory reading for Americans: [http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target- Innocent/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target- Innocent/dp/1594035229/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458663056&sr=8-1&keywords=three+felonies+a+day). Virtually everyone is guilty of something if someone wants to look hard enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Berlin parties in S-bahn stations or beneath bridges, usually around Warschauer. Those cannot possibly be legal, but nobody bothers to stop them.

<comment><USER13> The police here are remarkably tolerant of most victimless crimes, thankfully.

<comment><USER14> This sort of raves violates all sorts of environmental and health and safety codes. It only takes one fire with a couple dead to make them all go away. Look, I used to like raves when I was younger, but it's silly to claim that anybody should be allowed to organize anything anywhere without regard for the neighbors, safety of visitors or work load of emergency services.

<comment><USER15> > it's silly to claim that anybody should be allowed to organize anything > anywhere without regard for the neighbors, safety of visitors or work load > of emergency services.

I don't think anyone is arguing in favor of that. My experience in Berlin has been that a lot more is allowed than in other cities I've experienced, but within reasonable boundaries. And I think that's a wonderful thing. Here in Holland I feel like the state is an overprotective parent. We shouldn't obsess over safety at the expense of _living_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is ambiguous about drugs being illegal in almost every country on the planet (with a handful of exceptions)? Just because the police doesn't catch all the murderers doesn't make murder legal. That's crazy logic.

<comment><USER17> The ambiguous part is the "X is illegal, but everyone openly does X all of the time, and the police don't seem to care... until they do" way of doing things. This applies to everything from the "unlicensed gathering" to the drug use to the (seemingly) inconsistent punishment for the drug use.

<comment><USER18> Probably different drugs used - not necessarily inconsistent or arbitrary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The underground party scene in China (especially in Shenzhen) is getting bigger and bigger. The party isn't over and raids like that are not something that party goers are not used to.

</comment><comment><USER20> An expat in British English generally means a British or similar professional person who is _temporarily_ (estar) working in a country, but expects to return home (maybe their whole working life until retirement). It implies you identify yourself with your birth country.

An immigrant is someone who has _permanently_ (ser) moved - who now defines their identity as being from their new county.

That said, there is a nice article on The Guardian (a socialist UK newspaper) which agrees with the racial bias: [https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global- de...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global-development- professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration)

An expat in American English can now mean someone who has moved to a country e.g. I heard a retired couple call their mostly American community "expats" in Mexico.

It definitely has overtones of a white professional job. The meaning is obviously in the process of changing, and has country specific divergences (home country, and away country).

It is a loaded term of group identity, so yes, it will exclude some people with bias.

</comment><comment><USER21> Local police often only act on request from Beijing, in the spirit of: "we have a new national crackdown on <subject X>; go arrest some people". We have a saying here 山高皇帝远 ("the mountains are high and the emperor is far").

<comment><USER22> OT: I'd learned the idiom as 天高皇帝遠; didn't know there are variations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why did the author assumed that the party was illegal? The fact that police raided it doesn't mean that it as illegal; it just means that police decided to treat it like illegal.

Overall, this description feels like a very gentle slap on the wrist, compared to China's reputation; they probably got such a lax treatment — even given chairs to sit — exactly because all the expats. Nobody even got beaten by the police; I feel that a Chinese-only party would be treated much rougher.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't get the point of this article. Chinas has police and they do a good job, is that it?

</comment><comment><USER25> So the 90s are just reaching Shenzhen?

</comment><comment><USER26> The bribe wasn't enough

</comment><comment><USER27> And how is this relevant in any way?

<comment><USER28> If you just read the headline and not the article, then maybe the article is about the really bad recession that is going on in China right now (wellknown to all readers of HN). And how the expats caught there must "reflect" now that the party's over ...

<comment><USER27> Can you explain how I can infer that by reading the article alone? It was about people being detained at an illegal party.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting read. Good to see the police making sure laws are followed.

<comment><USER30> The article clearly talked of how they aren't.

Though motorbike taxis are illegal, they are ubiquitous except for temporary crackdowns. Though the raves were against the rules, they were advertised publicly for four years before any action was taken and there will be more publicly advertised raves that police ignore next year.

<comment><USER29> I don't really understand your point. Not every speeder in the US are caught. Would you say the police doing temporary crackdowns is not a good thing?

We should celebrate the police here for doing a good job trying to uphold law and order. Perhaps if they had more resources they could go after the other cases of lawbreaking mentioned, not as part of the main story, in the article.

<comment><USER31> > I don't really understand your point.

The point is the inconsistent enforcement of laws. And you can be assured that if someone was wealthy enough, the laws don't apply to them. I think that's what the author was talking about when he said 25 people who had tested positive for drugs were let go and not held. They were probably connected somehow, or paid a bribe. China is an incredibly corrupt country where bribes are standard practice. (Source: Bribes the Unspoken Rule in China: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardlevick/2015/01/21/new- dat...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardlevick/2015/01/21/new-data-bribery- is-often-an-unspoken-rule-in-china/) and Corruption Index: [https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results](https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results) )

Moreover, their inconsistent enforcement of the law is why they have such a shitty environmental record/problem. China has laws on the books regarding pollution and the environment comparable to that of the U.S believe it or not. But they _do not enforce any of them_. They don't have the equivalent of the EPA who's sole job it is to go after offenders. Some inspector shows up wanting to see your carbon scrubbers on your exhaust towers? "Oh, I must have forgot your birthday, here's a wad of cash. See you next year." I witnessed something shockingly similar to that happen on a plant tour in 2013. I was dumbfounded and speechless. The plant manager thought it was a big joke.

I have nearly 2 dozen unique stamps in my passport over the last 15 years. China is the only stamp I will never have a duplicate of. I've been to some pretty bad areas and countries and China's wasn't "I fear for my safety bad", well, if I'm being honest it was a little, but I like that. It's exciting. No, it was "Holy crap this culture is complete backwards and toxic." People care very little about their fellow man/neighbor and I was disgusted by it. It seemed like everyone was trying to pull a scam on everyone else. I felt slimy watching it happen.

<comment><USER32> > ...25 people who had tested positive for drugs were let go and not held. > They were probably connected somehow, or paid a bribe.

There are plenty of perfectly rational reasons why one might test positive for drugs but not be held.

In the US, at least, your levels must be high enough that they are unambiguous when factoring in margin of measurement error, but any amount is enough to get a warrant or have just cause to search your person/vehicle.

Alternatively, I take a prescription medication which causes me to test positive (hilariously high actually) on some drug tests. I carry my prescription and doctor's note on a prescription pad whenever I travel, and it's not _that_ uncommon.

Jumping straight to corruption is unfairly stereotyping China, which, though it may have a problem, has many more honest cops/prosecutors than dirty ones.

<comment><USER31> > Jumping straight to corruption is unfairly stereotyping China, which, though > it may have a problem, has many more honest cops/prosecutors than dirty > ones.

When your country ranks 100th on the world's corruption index, it's not "unfairly stereotyping". It's a fact backed up scientific data and hard evidence. China _IS_ corrupt. No amount of mental gymnastics is going to reason away all the hard evidence. I experienced it first hand, and I'm not some amateur traveler. Again, I've been traveling for the better part of 2 decades.

One of the first steps in correcting any problem is admitting you have one. China, Chinese nationalists and Chinese expats who jump to defend the country on internet message boards like this one and reddit have an impossibly hard time with that first step. It's going to keep China languishing in mediocrity for some time to come.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any site to find open source projects needing developers? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any website that connects open source projects with developers - a place where open source projects can post jobs(task)they need to get done and interested programmers can search and browse it? <comment><USER2> If you like open source web projects, there are great ones listed at <http://libreprojects.net>

Most of them also need developers, and some have specific jobs. ownCloud for instance has some starters: <http://owncloud.org/dev/junior-jobs/> and so has Unhosted: [https://github.com/unhosted/website/wiki/State-of-the- moveme...](https://github.com/unhosted/website/wiki/State-of-the-movement)

</comment><comment><USER3> OpenHatch lists tasks from various open-source projects, usually aimed at new contributors - <http://openhatch.org/search/> \- any project listed there would be actively looking for help and welcoming to new people.

From my experience though, just about every open-source project out there would love to have more people helping out. Have a look at the project's bug tracker.

</comment><comment><USER4> Weekend Hacker connects developers with projects. I don't think all the projects are open source but it might be worth having a look.

<http://www.weekendhacker.net/>

</comment><comment><USER5> For any of my projects, go to the issues page on github and there's the list of things I need done. You can then message me through github or comment on the issues as well. This is true for a lot of projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have an idea for a open source bounty board. You can post a job that you would like the open source project X to implement feature Y and you are willing to pay Z to whoever does it. What do you think?

<comment><USER7> Gun.io already has that covered, at least in the States (for now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Try <http://gun.io/open/></comment>