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Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP

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389 points kurinikku | 4 comments | 17 Nov 24 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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emmanueloga_ ◴[18 Nov 24 01:05 UTC] No.42168787[source]▶
Warning: Diving into SCIP/Lisp/Scheme can transform how you think about programming... food for thought is always welcomed! But applying those ideas wholesale to OOP codebases often backfires or gets pushback from teammates. Languages handle paradigms differently, and going against the grain usually leads to worse code.

Example: After Lisp, you might replace every for loop with forEach or chain everything through map/reduce. But unless you’re working in a language that fully embraces functional programming, this approach can hurt both readability and performance.

At the end of the day, it’s grounding to remember there’s mutable memory and a CPU processing the code. These days, I find data-oriented design and “mechanical sympathy” (aligning code with hardware realities) more practical day-to-day than more abstract concepts like Church numerals.

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1. llm_trw ◴[18 Nov 24 05:36 UTC] No.42169977[source]▶
>At the end of the day, it’s grounding to remember there’s mutable memory and a CPU processing the code.

And yet goto is even less popular than Lisp despite being the only way that CPUs implement control flow.

What's even more bizarre is that despite caches being the only way to get any performance out of modern CPUs we still don't have a language that treats the memory hierarchy as a first class citizen. The closest is Linux flavored c with a sea of underscores.

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2. taeric ◴[18 Nov 24 06:00 UTC] No.42170094[source]▶
Lisp has goto, if you want it. :)

I confess it has made transcribing some algorithms a bit easier.

3. renox ◴[18 Nov 24 21:53 UTC] No.42177519[source]▶
I don't find it bizarre: even assembly language don't have much control over the memory hierarchy, there's prefetch load and nothing else...
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4. llm_trw ◴[19 Nov 24 01:02 UTC] No.42179094[source]▶
So much the worse for assembly language.

Lest we forget that modern x86 machine code is an assembly language and the machine code, or microinstructions in newspeak, is completely hidden from view.