I think the EU is great, but I wonder how much of that peace can be attributed to both the United States and USSR both having large armies camped through Europe for most of that time.
I had the same thought. The answer is there is no one thing that does/did it. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that Germany and France are closer to partners than combatants.
Yeah, external factors like those mentioned obviously play a part, as do internal factors, as taught to us by playing Civilisation - fat happy democracies don't like making war very much, or for very long; it's expensive and you have to get off the couch...
Yes, if Lisp is so powerful, where are all the super programs written in it? I'm only aware of EMACs and maybe at one point Autocad? And I guess PG wrote a couple webapps with it....
That's a logical fallacy. Something can be both great and unknown to you. Usually, you seek information about things you know you need/want, and can afford. If a topic does not interest you, you will forever remain oblivious to it, except maybe for some tangential news about it that reach you by accident.
It's naive to think that just because you're a programmer you know everything there is to know about the software industry. You don't. You know about a small fraction of the mainstream development tools, and even those, at a superficial level. For example, can you name the top software products for running local elections? how about automating a chemistry research lab? packages for oil exploration? vacation property management? real-time spoken Chinese processing? computational archeology? artist talent management? threat modeling for distributed corporate networks?
See? :-)
"Social" programmers, the guys you see in chat rooms and "community" websites are all mostly generalists, and typically work in well defined roles as grunt programmers. Nothing fancy, website here, a database there, a GUI or two, click, generate, zip, distribute, and call it a day type work. Don't let this closed echo-system define your perception of "the software industry".
There should at least be one canonical example. I'm not claiming to know everything, I'm trying to fill in my knowledge. If lisp is so great, and so much more productive, and used by the greatest programmers on Earth, point me to some great code so I can become more informed.
Should I start reading EMACS source? Show me the code! If there's not at least one great open source project written in lisp, I'm not inclined to take your claims prima facie.
I don't know about super-programs, but I use Clojure at work (doing things no one else would ever care about) and I use it at home to solve fun problems. I previously did the same things in PHP and Perl and Ruby and Python and such, and the Clojure versions are easier to write and maintain, easier to use, less code, more fun etc. Same for Common Lisp, generally.
I wouldn't extrapolate beyond that. I don't know what languages are good for writing super-programs since I never wrote one. Super-programs are a small subset of all programs.
Well, there's the stuff from ITA Software that powers Orbitz. Flightcaster is using Clojure. Impact Solutions in Houston uses Lisp for real time analysis of oil rig data.
I think the standard argument would be that the average programmers are using average languages, so popularity is a horrible measuring stick for powerful languages.
I think you meant that you can reproduce a fraction of this app's functionality, and present it in an unattractive way with really bad useability, in ten lines of code. And even then you'd be exaggerating.
Second, realize that this was developed from start to finish in 48 hours, by some not untalented people... they seem to have put a lot of thought into it, and the details really show.
Doesn't that seem to emphasize the guy's point? It seems like a neat if simplistic little tool and if you have to watch a video to tell how it's something more...
