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The programmers who live in Flatland

(blog.redplanetlabs.com)
107 points winkywooster | 2 comments | 27 Nov 25 15:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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libraryofbabel ◴[07 Dec 25 16:34 UTC] No.46182942[source]▶
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap.

It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.

The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

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nine_k ◴[07 Dec 25 17:17 UTC] No.46183285[source]▶
Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript.

Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.

Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.

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1. slifin ◴[07 Dec 25 21:41 UTC] No.46185450[source]▶
Plenty of ways to define complex data shapes in Clojure

Spec is definitely underrated here considering it's built into the language and has a wider scope but for most people they want the intellisense experience which you can get with clj-kondo + mailli but is not built in so most teams don't use it, fair enough

I'd like to move the goal posts though and say I want flowstorm in every (any other?!) language

I can just run the program and scrub backwards and forwards through the execution and look at all the immutable values frame by frame with a high level UI with plenty of search/autocomplete options

For program understanding there's nothing better

The fact I can program against the timeline of values of my program and create custom UI on top is crazy

One of the most mind blowing demos to me was Bret Victor's inventing on principle and having a programmable reverse debugger for your language makes those demos viable

I built an emulator recently for work that replays what happens on live locally, combined with flowstorm I can go line by line and tell you exactly what happened and why, no print statements no reruns with my own custom UI customised to our apps interesting parts

This is my appeal to anyone outside of Clojure please build flowstorm for JavaScript and or Python

The design of flowstorm is definitely helped by the fact that 95% of Clojure programs are immutable but I don't think it's impossible to replicate just very difficult

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2. nine_k ◴[08 Dec 25 01:41 UTC] No.46187359[source]▶
This indeed is one of the superpowers. I hope Elixir will eventually acquire it.