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The Paul Graham vs Nigerian Twitter Saga; Lexical racism and language bias masked as ChatGPT hysteria (medium.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] 10 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well. This writeup has pushed me to distrust Graham's ability to design Lisps. In a previous sneer, I wasn't impressed by his languages, but now I'm fast-rejecting them. (Also previously folks seemed keen to defend him when they thought his essays sounded smart. Maybe those essays just sound white!)

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    He sure has a lot of sycophants. "You cannot easily dismiss his accomplishments! He is wealthy." Yeah wealthy for being on the internet in the 90s with one of the most obvious ideas of all time.

    Arc and Bel are as blub as lisps can get. That says a lot about how their author must think in blub language.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    my thoughts on paully’s output are along the same lines — it’s really a shame that he’s the guy a lot of people learned Lisp from, because it’s very clear he’s just a rich white guy bullshitting on that and every other topic he’s famous for

    also, this stood out from a quote in your first linked post:

    Server-based deployment of software was a central theme in Graham’s essays, and his continuation-based web framework was an interesting and fairly novel way to create continuity across multiple requests in a single session.

    Seaside did this first, though it never got a ton of traction. if naive continuations are how the orange site’s doing sessions and state tracking, that goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so incredibly bad at scaling and has such weird performance characteristics. there’s ways to make continuations more performant in this role, but it takes a degree of low-level understanding paully’s never demonstrated, since his languages have always been built on top of Racket (which is a fine language for making languages! it’s fun as hell! but one day you will run out of runtime to repurpose)

    (I should see if Racket finally has good LSP support for #lang languages. I’d seriously use it so much more if I could bring my own editor)

    also, holy shit those responses to your second linked post really haven’t aged well at all, have they?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well.

    This is why I love Perl. Larry Wall has a linguistics background and created the only programming language where you can conjugate variables.

    (I know it sounds like I'm making fun of perl here, and I am, but I also legitimately do love perl)

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