TechTakes

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?

The essay uses "delve" multiple times, so it must have been written by ChatGPT.

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)