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Search - "lisp"
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I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.39 -
Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.
Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.
Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.
Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.
Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.
But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!
My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.
In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.
If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.
So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.6 -
Lisp code was live-debugged and fixed with REPL on a spacecraft 100 million miles away
“An even more impressive instance of remote debugging occurred on NASA's 1998 Deep Space 1 mission. A half year after the space craft launched, a bit of Lisp code was going to control the spacecraft for two days while conducting a sequence of experiments. Unfortunately, a subtle race condition in the code had escaped detection during ground testing and was already in space. When the bug manifested in the wild--100 million miles away from Earth--the team was able to diagnose and fix the running code, allowing the experiments to complete. One of the programmers described it as follows:
Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.”
https://gigamonkeys.com/book/...4 -
"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"
Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.
"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"
VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I
Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"
Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"
VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"
Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.
There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.
All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.
I think I scare him.12 -
Do you remember GAME LOGO programming language where you can move the turtle around the map and draw lines? Someone made a Lisp out of it!
https://toodle.studio/3 -
Give up. Share Target API is already on Android, even in garbage like Samsung Internet. Desktop native apps are already history, mobile apps are sure to follow. Led by Apple Silicon, we will add JS-specific hardware to the CPUs and conquer the world. JavaScript will be the only language, with an exception being C and Lisp.9
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There are a couple:
A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)
A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!
A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss
Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Honestly, the more I work with compilers the more I understand why this job's listing asked for Lisp experience. What I don't understand is WHY The FUck are they making me DO THIS SHit in fucking JAVA and NOt IN LISP!3
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You've heard of Common Lisp! You've heard of Swift!
Now, it is time for Common Swift!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...1 -
Is ECMAScript a dialect of Lisp?
"JavaScript has much in common with Scheme. It is a dynamic language. It has a flexible datatype (arrays) that can easily simulate s-expressions. And most importantly, functions are lambdas. Because of this deep similarity, all the functions in [recursive programming primer] 'The Little Schemer' can be written in JavaScript."
— Douglas Crockford
An interesting discussion on SO (https://stackoverflow.com/questions...)2