ea5db41722
Maybe this is my recency bias writing, but "Being Popular" may be one of my favorite Paul Graham essays that I've read. "Being Popular" outlines Paul Graham's ideas about what an ideal programming language would look like. This essay took me 1-2 hours to read, but it was worth the time. Here are some quotes that I enjoyed (not sorted in any meaningful order): "A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. He knows that people sometimes ask for things that they turn out not to want. To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do something; by then, whoever's asking him may be fairly annoyed, but at least they probably really do want whatever they're asking for." "In this particular case there is a way to finesse our way out of the problem. If we treat data structures as if they were functions on indexes, we could write (a x y) instead, which is even shorter than the Perl form. Similar tricks may shorten other types of expressions." "The latest hot language, Python, is a watered-down Lisp with infix syntax and no macros." "Hackers would think a lot more highly of Lisp if Common Lisp had powerful string libraries and good OS support." "I think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself." Some take-aways: - Let's refer to Python as "Diet Lisp" from now until the end of time. - Fight to keep your user-base small for as long as you can. Only fools want large user bases. - Rich Hickey definitely read this article; he took some ideas with him; he left some ideas behind. - Focus language design efforts around defining rich standard libraries, especially for string manipulation. - Worry little about supporting backwards compatibility; design a language that can and is often rewritten. - Shift the burden of optimizing code performance to the user by designing a powerful runtime profiler that is tightly integrated into the language runtime. - Minimize the costs users face when experimenting: ensure that your language is interactive; ensure users can create REPLs quickly. - Support OS-level libraries (think about Go). - Maximize introspection and hackability. What a useful read!
5.7 KiB
5.7 KiB
- How to Write Usefully
- Being a Noob
- Haters
- The Two Kinds of Moderate
- Fashionable Problems
- Having Kids
- The Lesson to Unlearn
- Novelty and Heresy
- The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
- General and Surprising
- Charisma / Power
- The Risk of Discovery
- How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
- Life is Short
- Economic Inequality
- The Refragmentation
- Jessica Livingston
- A Way to Detect Bias
- Write Like You Talk
- Default Alive or Default Dead?
- Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
- Change Your Name
- What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
- The Ronco Principle
- What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
- Don't Talk to Corp Dev
- Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
- How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
- How You Know
- The Fatal Pinch
- Mean People Fail
- Before the Startup
- How to Raise Money
- Investor Herd Dynamics
- How to Convince Investors
- Do Things that Don't Scale
- Startup Investing Trends
- How to Get Startup Ideas
- The Hardware Renaissance
- Startup = Growth
- Black Swan Farming
- The Top of My Todo List
- Writing and Speaking
- How Y Combinator Started
- Defining Property
- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
- A Word to the Resourceful
- Schlep Blindness
- Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
- Why Startup Hubs Work
- The Patent Pledge
- Subject: Airbnb
- Founder Control
- Tablets
- What We Look for in Founders
- The New Funding Landscape
- Where to See Silicon Valley
- High Resolution Fundraising
- What Happened to Yahoo
- The Future of Startup Funding
- The Acceleration of Addictiveness
- The Top Idea in Your Mind
- How to Lose Time and Money
- Organic Startup Ideas
- Apple's Mistake
- What Startups Are Really Like
- Persuade xor Discover
- Post-Medium Publishing
- The List of N Things
- The Anatomy of Determination
- What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
- The Trouble with the Segway
- Ramen Profitable
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
- A Local Revolution?
- Why Twitter is a Big Deal
- The Founder Visa
- Five Founders
- Relentlessly Resourceful
- How to Be an Angel Investor
- Why TV Lost
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
- What I've Learned from Hacker News
- Startups in 13 Sentences
- Keep Your Identity Small
- After Credentials
- Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
- The High-Res Society
- The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
- Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
- A Fundraising Survival Guide
- The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
- Cities and Ambition
- Disconnecting Distraction
- Lies We Tell Kids
- Be Good
- Why There Aren't More Googles
- Some Heroes
- How to Disagree
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
- A New Venture Animal
- Trolls
- Six Principles for Making New Things
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub
- The Future of Web Startups
- How to Do Philosophy
- News from the Front
- How Not to Die
- Holding a Program in One's Head
- Stuff
- The Equity Equation
- An Alternative Theory of Unions
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors
- Two Kinds of Judgement
- Microsoft is Dead
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup
- Is It Worth Being Wise?
- Learning from Founders
- How Art Can Be Good
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
- A Student's Guide to Startups
- How to Present to Investors
- Copy What You Like
- The Island Test
- The Power of the Marginal
- Why Startups Condense in America
- How to Be Silicon Valley
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
- See Randomness
- Are Software Patents Evil?
- 6,631,372
- Why YC
- How to Do What You Love
- Good and Bad Procrastination
- Web 2.0
- How to Fund a Startup
- The Venture Capital Squeeze
- Ideas for Startups
- What I Did this Summer
- Inequality and Risk
- After the Ladder
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source
- Hiring is Obsolete
- The Submarine
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
- Return of the Mac
- Writing, Briefly
- Undergraduation
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
- How to Start a Startup
- What You'll Wish You'd Known
- Made in USA
- It's Charisma, Stupid
- Bradley's Ghost
- A Version 1.0
- What the Bubble Got Right
- The Age of the Essay
- The Python Paradox
- Great Hackers
- Mind the Gap
- How to Make Wealth
- The Word "Hacker"
- What You Can't Say
- Filters that Fight Back
- Hackers and Painters
- If Lisp is So Great
- The Hundred-Year Language
- Why Nerds are Unpopular
- Better Bayesian Filtering
- Design and Research
- A Plan for Spam
- Revenge of the Nerds
- Succinctness is Power
- What Languages Fix
- Taste for Makers
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
- What Made Lisp Different
- The Other Road Ahead
- The Roots of Lisp
- Five Questions about Language Design
- Being Popular
- Java's Cover
- Beating the Averages
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications
- Chapter 1 of Ansi Common Lisp
- Chapter 2 of Ansi Common Lisp
- Programming Bottom-Up
- This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California