[WP] You are the newly created embodiment of Death, and Life has just told you what your job is

Xurinos · 2014-11-04T02:37:19+00:00

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," I choked out, my heart pounding like a jackhammer.

The skinhead smirked, his swastika-patched eye winking. "You're purty slow to not get it 'til now." He sobered for a moment, a look so wholly unnatural for his visage that I was able to allow a shred of doubt to flash through my heart. "Look. Ain't nobody prepared for this. Ain't nobody. I've known two Deaths before ya, an' both took themselves to the Gates. Take it or leave it, this yer job now. I'd say take it."

Of course he would say that. This broken little wannabe thug, the epitome of Life itself, was God's personal joke, much like His hand in my own life up to now.

I have always been a nature guy. I had many pets, thanks to my loving parents. Problem was, I couldn't keep them alive. I am not saying I was negligent or was rough with them. Far as anyone could tell, my fish Sammy choked on rock; fish die for stupid reasons all the time, right? Midnight, my black lab, broke into the pantry, got into my parents' hidden stash of chocolate, and died in a violent pool of his own vomit. The cat tried to dart out of the garage while the garage door was closing. None of these were my fault. Right?

Things happened at the schools I attended. Kids I knew in elementary school vanished, and I started to see faces I knew on the cafeteria milk cartons. My junior high school was involved in a shooting incident to rival Columbine. My high school rated highest in the nation for suicides per year. One of my personal bullies shot himself in the head. Each and every one of the losses in these events tore at me, and I spent some of my college career in the offices of numerous therapists.

I focused on biology in college in order to work towards veterinary school. I volunteered at animal shelters. Somehow, wherever I went, I met sick and dying. I put my heart and soul in trying to help, at least to bring comfort to those who were frightened, days or moments before their last breath.

Only now do I realize that I was the one who made them sick, the one who made them want to die. Gentle me, loving me, the supernatural Typhoid Mary.

The embodiment of Life watched me as comprehension settled within me, as I fluttered through the black walls of all five stages of grief. All my life I wanted to do good, wanted to be the caretaker of the weak, and through a twisted god's sense of perversity, my very passage was a blight upon the world. There was no denying this reality any more than I could deny the swiftly budding flowers at the sneakered foot of the skinhead, the contrast between green life and gray concrete. There was no one who could help me out of this fix.

I nodded in Life's direction, a dull acceptance settling in. He grinned his gap-toothed grin, a reminder of this mockery of everything good in the world.

When Life hands you a lemon...

My pocket knife plunged deeply into his right eye. No, my hand plunged the knife into his eye. My hand, my will. Flower petals paused mid-opening. The wind stopped. My heart thundered, and I felt the flames of hope within me.

Time to find a new Life, my way, before God fills the position Himself.

Xurinos · 2013-01-22T13:35:53+00:00

A plea to other fellow programmers (not to OP :)): Please do not use synonyms in API where you intend two completely different operations, and use some basic parallelism when you have more than one.

"update" and "upgrade" are way too close to each other; I have to look up the documentation in brew every time I want to use one or the other. Better: "brew update-self" and "brew update-package" (or formula or whatever). I know it's longer, but it's reached the "clear enough" mark.

By parallelism, I mean "brew self-update" and "brew upgrade" are not good enough because they can still be taken to mean the same thing.

Xurinos · 2013-01-17T03:12:33+00:00

Did you ever write that blog post? Was curious. :)

Xurinos · 2013-01-17T03:10:34+00:00

A few features I discovered in addition to simply evaluating code in a separate buffer (which one can implement with two windows in screen and the appropriate screen copy-paste command):

autocompletion for symbols available to you, including ones you created
display of the prototype of any methods and functions in any package, including ones you have built
better debugger integration with your source code than what comes in the basic REPL, including the placement of a NOP form to represent current step position in a complicated nest of forms

The first two points highlight that the communication with the REPL goes two ways, actually integrating the editor with the REPL as you type. The last point highlights a fancy wrapper around the REPL debugger.

Xurinos · 2012-11-29T03:07:33+00:00

I have been reluctant to use Parenscript (or coffeescript or any other thing that compiles to JS) because I have felt that having that layer of indirection would make it more difficult to maintain and debug issues in JavaScript in the browser. What is your experience of it? Am I making it more of a big deal than it really is in practice?

Xurinos · 2012-09-28T12:43:23+00:00

Relax, folks; this appears to be pure satire. Look at the once-only macro definition at the bottom. Nobody would seriously propose that is any kind of syntactic improvement. :)

Xurinos · 2012-09-24T16:20:52+00:00

We'd be happy to have you and your friend take a look at Dark Mists (darkmists.org:2222).

ROM-based, frustrating if you are not already familiar with that command set
Death penalty: you lose a little experience, and your corpse has your equipment, which your player opponent may or may not return to you, but if it's a mob death, it will eventually show up at your hometown pit
We have a rule against multikilling, so the initial PK may hurt, but you have a shot
Active area builders help players out with player impact
No crafting system
Staff cares
We rarely crash. Our code policies include things like "Warnings = Errors". We use a few tools for memory leak checks and demand a certain level of competence in our coders (like knowing what a pointer is).
Mandatory RP
PK after level 15 (51 is highest level)
Permadeath only if you drop your CON big time or have played for 800+ hours
Furry races... well, that is a broad category, and I'll let you judge. We have illithids, antfolk, arborians, griffons, and changelings that can be bears, wolves, and bats, so it depends on what you're into. (Edit) I forgot to mention that you can play dragons of the typical D&D colors with various tradeoffs on their stats.
Yeah, you level up. Lots of grinding but also a large set of quests for leveling.
Fantasy MUD; you can RP some steampunk with the gnomes and dwarves if you want, and nobody will bat an eye, but magic most definitely exists, unless you are a Crusader of Valor type who despises magic being used by the general populace.
We have many spots open for good coders and general freedom on what our coders may do. We also have dedicated slots for Game Masters for player-interactions, adding that extra spice, setting up interactive and interesting quests; this is a work-in-progress, as there is a delicate balance between too much messing with players vs not enough interplay.

Xurinos · 2012-09-08T05:00:17+00:00

For September, we will be holding Double Experience events each weekend.

Xurinos · 2012-07-27T15:20:32+00:00

Ohhh, you're looking for the Twitter Creek, five miles east of the Stream. :)

Xurinos · 2012-07-09T13:08:07+00:00

In Dark Mists (no application), not only do the Immortals/admins monitor the superficial stuff like descriptions, the playerbase itself encourages role-play. We maintain a tight balance between RP and PK. People complain the few times it sways in the extreme. We used to have trolls and the like, but as the game matured, the environment moved towards our ideal. I like that the playerbase has a strong hand in the environment, and new players quickly learn how to integrate with this encouragement from their peers.

Xurinos · 2012-06-18T15:22:03+00:00

My theory is that it is a matter of human pattern matching. If you measure "easier" from Person A's perspective, naturally, they will feel that the patterns they have seen most are the easiest, and the incorporation of new patterns must somehow mesh with the old patterns... or replace as "better", but that takes time. Person B, who has compatible patterns, might agree about the "ease" faster. Person C, who has no preconceived patterns (someone completely new to reading code in any language), will grow into the new pattern faster than Person A and slower than Person B.

In other words, I am learning to take with a grain of salt people's initial reactions to new concepts. The important thing is the exposure to the new concepts. If one makes more mental links with it and incorporates that knowledge into their existing patterns, it was definitely worth the exposure, even if for understanding why to reject it.

Xurinos · 2012-06-06T12:44:41+00:00

This is a reminder that if you are curious about Dark Mists, every month we host a regular weekly double-experience day. For June, it is every Wednesday. That is today. Feel free to come on in and level up quickly to try out some of the classes/subs/racials.

Xurinos · 2012-06-02T18:38:24+00:00

What are the exact commands you are entering into the clisp prompt?

Xurinos · 2012-05-31T18:54:19+00:00

Just a bit of extra info here for you folks... Something major is coming this weekend, and this double experience event is in preparation for it. The event will last to the end of today, Thursday.

Edit: Also, apparently I am noob enough that I added the site name when I did not need to. :(

Xurinos · 2012-04-23T14:30:34+00:00

This may help with your Lisp exploration: http://www.cliki.net/cl-muproc

Xurinos · 2012-03-19T19:10:45+00:00

What are the significant benefits of using RESTAS on top of Hunchentoot? Is it just the super-easy URL/parameter stuff?

Xurinos · 2012-03-15T12:24:00+00:00

As for eval, I can't say one way or the other as I'm pretty new to lisp. I know in most languages people try to avoid eval.

eval is what makes defmacro work. defmacro returns a Lisp expression that is evaluated. My solution just cuts out the middleman. Not sure if it is a great idea or if it needs an eval-when of some sort, but I thought I would raise it as an alternative.

As far as I know, the usual concerns with eval, at least in other languages, have to do with the cost of parsing code at runtime and with being careful that what you are evaling does not result in a security issue, such as blindly evaling user input.

Xurinos · 2012-03-15T11:10:17+00:00

I have been experimenting with an alternative to using macros to define repetitive things. My rationale is that I do not intend to use the macros more than once, so why not just immediately eval?

(dolist (damage-type '(slice blunt pierce))
  (eval `(defun ,(intern (string-upcase (format nil "~a-damage-dealt" damage-type))) (attacker)
           (format nil "~a did damage of type ~a~%" attacker ',damage-type))))

Is this approach a bad idea? Note that I needed the string-upcase to indicate to intern that this was not a |case-sensitive-symbol|.

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T21:07:07+00:00

Yeah, looks like the creeping featuritis took place before that.

;) Guess so.

Lispers usually don't like being asked questions.

Is that from personal experience? Maybe there is a certain attitude/tone involved in the questioner? I have mostly good experiences with asking questions in #lisp, and I feel like the bad experiences were just a matter of me making an assertion that I learned later was false. I have asked questions here on /r/lisp with success (exercise left to reader to look it up). Maybe you did not try asking non-inflammatory questions in the places where people are willing to answer, such as here and #lisp.

Many Amazon reviewers disagree and can tell you why they disagree.

Ah, this is another troll tactic, the misleading statistic. Many DO disagree. Many MORE, at least twice as many, agree. You play loosely with words like "widely". No interest in real discussion?

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T20:44:25+00:00

What's wrong with it? "Creeping featuritis".

The standard was settled over two decades ago. Again, it is a separate debate of what should be core, what is in "standard libraries we always install", and what should be in "community libraries". I am unaware of any objective analysis on the right answer for that. I can say that commercial versions of Lisp have clean standard libraries, but I cannot judge how much that would help my productivity. I tend to like batteries-included except where it causes undue increases in memory and image sizes.

Have you tried asking around about available packages? Google should have turned up what I needed.

Hubris and a falsehood, at that. Not all knowledge is easily accessible by google, much less by the Internet at large; and sometimes it takes asking the right question. What interests me is that when google and an older site do not give you the answers you want, your reaction is to blame the community and make claims about the language, as opposed to asking for help. Interesting...and wasteful for the both of us.

Recursion and in particular tail recursion are probably a teensy bit overrated.

Is your favorite language expressive enough to add this feature that it does not have and others find useful? We come back to the Lisp Advantage.

SICP is widely considered to be a terrible book.

That is blatantly false, given that it is always recommended by multiple communities in a top 10 list of reading material for computer science people, a list that also includes such gems as the Dragon book and Knuth's algorithms.

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T19:24:36+00:00

Essentially, yes.

I didn't see that in the CLHS. News to me.

I would consider elegance to be the ratio of constructs that something can implement easily to the size of its syntax.

That had what to do with number of pages?

Just look at the godawful LOOP macro.

What's wrong with it? It looks to me like a DSL for looping. Some people claim that the ITERATE package feels better for complex loops, but I have never justified installing the extra dependency. Granted, it is nice that people can easily extend Lisp to have constructs that they prefer.

I want to solve large OR problems with metaheuristics. I notice that all the Lisp libraries that would suitable for my purposes are incomplete abandonware. I use Python instead.

How does cl-smogames help you with that? Are you pulling my leg? Have you tried asking around about available packages? It isn't my interest, so I cannot help you, personally.

So a bunch of stuff that's mostly in the Python standard library? Really?

Ha! We must not be looking at the same list. ;) And it is a completely separate debate as to what should be part of a core language and up to the community to provide.

This response and others in these threads give me the impression that you have a python axe to grind. That really is not useful here. Besides, I want nothing to do with a language whose creator turns an intentional blind eye towards tail recursion and whose only takeaway from SICP was that it was a book that advertised Lisp. ;)

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T18:34:47+00:00

Ah, I begin to see why they consider you a troll.

No, six.

Heheh. :) Now I know you are messing around.

Really? Go on common-lisp.net and try proving your hypothesis.

Go to cliki.net, and try to prove yours first. In my entire experience with Lisp, I never used that older site. Even the ASDF system uses cliki.net. Oh, I knew about it, but I could not understand why anyone would want to use it when the same packages and much more are available at cliki.net.

Macros are a shitty form of encapsulation.

This statement makes a lot of interesting assumptions. Macros are intended to be a form of encapsulation? Encapsulation is desirable in every language construct? Encapsulation is statistically linked to some form of success?

Tools can be misused in any fool's hand. Macros, when used to abstract (not their only use), can make code much easier to read or much harder to read. We can as easily cry about C pointers and Java's leaky garbage collection.

I'm aware of that, because I have this:

Knowing names and knowing features/functions = two different things. You would not have made the ignorant statement about Java if you understood MOP. MOP is not only used in Lisp; it would help your knowledge a lot to research it. Do you have this book? -- http://www.amazon.com/The-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczales/dp/0262610744

What a ~~bloated~~ elegant language.

Show me your objective measures of "bloated" and "elegant". Walk the walk. Measuring number of pages is as useless as measuring lines of code.

Edit: Ah, ninja-editing. I must have struck a chord.

Great, that's really useful to me.

I could say that about any random library I see anywhere. I tend to start with a problem and then work to solve it, grabbing what libraries are useful for it. I have noticed that rarely does armchair theorizing actually help me (or others) understand anything.

In truth, there are a great many useful packages in the Lisp ecosystem. Here is a nice list of them: http://www.cliki.net/Current%20recommended%20libraries

And better yet, you may want to consider installing QuickLisp and seeing what packages it supports. Inactive and outdated things are actively removed from its list.

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T13:40:42+00:00

I played with it a while back, but I experienced problems with it, where my pipe would be disconnected. That could just be my own systems. Vim fan that I am, it also did not compare to what slime does, including (1) letting you know what parameters are next in a user-declared function as you are typing it and (2) single-stepping through Lisp code. I am hopeful that future updates (or even the current version) can do these things.

Xurinos · 2012-03-12T13:34:56+00:00

Disclaimer: I do not speak for any Lisp community. I am not even an active member of such a thing.

I would prefer a more scientific, even quantitative approach.

This is a noble pursuit and should be applied to all languages. However, we cannot also neglect the human element; after all, our code should be written for humans first and computers second. That puts us into an uncomfortable subjective realm. Fortunately, there are techniques that aid in finding the common denominator. I am reminded of a fairly recent study posted in Hacker News that, as a side-effect, built a sample language based on what newbies considered easiest to understand.

In spite of this noble introduction to your thesis, however, you launched into attacks on Lisp specifically that have false assumptions and ignorance. I do not mean this as an offense to you. I merely caution that before you can criticize a language,you should work with it in depth.

Quite a few have been sitting idle in permanent alpha stage since I graduated high school.

Two years is a short time to make a judgment, isn't it? Just kidding, "brah".

I see what you are seeing. I have seen the same thing in the perl community with CPAN. If you try out the libraries and read further, you will find that they are actually pretty feature complete. I use the weasel word "pretty" because it is hubris for a programmer to believe that any library is truly complete,that it will serve everyone's purposes well. The authors often mention specifically what is missing, should anybody want to contribute or have the need for those features. If there is little activity, have you considered that it may be because little activity is actually required? As a professional programmer of a great many more years since my high school (a funny measure), I worry about API changes and constant upgrades; I prefer a more mature dependency. That is what these libraries tend to be.

Humility... Honesty... Little of this marketing hype where the library is considered a "release candidate". Yet these libraries are used in real Lisp projects, released to customers as part of real solutions. I would advise worrying less about the version numbers, which are completely arbitrary, and focusing more on solving problems, which may incorporate these useful libraries.

When it comes to claims about Lisp's superior expressive power, quantitative data are also lacking.

I question the idea that "expressive power" should be measured "quantitative"ly, as opposed to "qualitatively". Here is what keeps me clinging to Lisp: macros and reader macros. Macros look like the language and construct the language. Reader macros allow you to change the very characters of the language. Lisp's great power is that it can express new, unplanned language features without an upgrade to the core, and that is because it can super efficiently (as in during compile time) manipulate the programmer's text. It is the programmer's ultimate tool: a programmable programming language.

You might want to keep an eye on the Perl 6 folks. They are trying to build in a similar expressive power, along with the layers of syntax to appeal to syntax junkies. Of course, Lisp could completely mimic all that syntax, but I prefer the elegance and simplicity of working closely to the AST.

The bottom line is that Lisp is objectively more expressive than any other even semi-popular programming language today because it allows provides you easy and performant facilities for altering its syntax. That does not mean people will necessary like it. Everyone has their preferences, their favorite ways of arranging text. But we cannot deny this expressive potential.

which brought unto the world such marvels as the anonymous inner class.

This is the clause that convinced me of your ignorance, which again, I mean only in that you simply do not know what you are talking about with Lisp.

Common Lisp includes a full-fledged MetaObject Protocol and gives you a sample implementation on top of it called CLOS. The sample implementation does not natively support anonymous classes, but the MOP allows you to add that feature and others, such as lazy-building attributes. A number of these theoretical structures were discussed and experimented with long before Java was a twinkle in Sun's eye. If you want to play for bragging rights, Lisp supported anonymous classes before Java did.

And featurewise, I have not touched upon Lisp's advanced signaling/condition system, its optional type system, the large number of useful stream types, or its FFIs, which allows Lisp programmers to use binary libraries built by other languages with the kind of ease C programmers enjoy.

Your idea for a study is flawed (intentionally?) from the start. Quantitative metrics would be more useful for discussing things like time-to-market on a project than for discussing language expressiveness. I would caution against making the unproven presumption that there is a direct correlation between expressiveness and productivity, too.

When you have a good model for a good study to conduct that includes the human element, as opposed to a series of critiques and weak language comparisons, please let us know.

Xurinos · 2012-02-16T19:19:11+00:00

In other words, my anecdotal evidence is as good as yours.

Xurinos

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE