Mark Tarver

> Could you provide an actual example for this?

Lists are given to the reader in angle brackets and come out in parentheses, or at least that's how it looks. I suppose the other possibility is that these are actually different types, but I'm not sure that's better.

What is a "produce"? I've never heard this term so used before. How does it differ from a map?

> Okay, now give me a break... this... is a "what"? Are you real now? A perfectly sensible and useful feature, a "what"? To be able to investigate function signatures and pass them around appropriately without constant hacking, is that bizarre? I guess airplanes are also bizarre to some...

That I half expected something in this nature is what had me in two minds over whether to reply to your prior comment at all. I suppose I'm glad there's not more of it, but really, this kind of attitude adds nothing to the discussion, and it certainly doesn't help make anyone's case that Raku has a community worth trying to be part of.

Function signatures, as opposed to functions, being first-class runtime values is objectively weird. Deriving one signature from another at compile time via reflection is unexceptionable and occasionally useful, sure. But the idea that a function's signature in isolation has meaning enough to treat as a runtime value in its own right is something I don't recall ever having seen in close to forty years of programming across a widely varied range of languages.

I did some looking around the docs, and…

I think you should separate the concepts of Java (the language) and the JVM in your mind while making your decision. You can absolutely write Clojure without touching Java, but at some point if your app scales you are going to have to understand optimizing and tuning the JVM, that being said, it's no different than optimizing and tuning the underlying OS (from a conceptual standpoint), it just happens to be a virtual run-time. You are not writing Java to tune the JVM as most of it is set by parameters and config files.

If you are dead set on no JVM there is always ClojureScript.

For reference I have worked in Clojure, CL and a little Scheme, but would not claim to be an expert in the latter two. From my experience Clojure is a LISP built for building user centric apps, where many of the others are an assortment of projects of people scratching their itch. Some good, some bad, some complete and documented, some not. They are very powerful, but seem to have less stewardship to keep the project on focus to be a dev platform for building holistic applications for businesses.

while it gets linked to a lot in discussions like this, it's worth noting the following article:

http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

That is very much what CL and Scheme felt like to me.

Also to note, I have never worked with any of the commercial offerings for CL, so take my opinion on the matter with the grain of salt that my exposure to them has been limited to open source offerings.

> the author claims that releasing derivative works of Shen under the GPL is copyright infringement

Do you have a source for this? The closest I could find was this[1]:

> Appropriating other people's work by copying the code and changing the license is IMO immoral.

If this is indeed the source material, then I think your characterization isn't _necessarily_ correct. Saying it's immoral isn't the same as making a claim about law.

The link provided[2] does indicate that de Raadt thinks it is a violation of copyright law however. Finally, I question whether there is actually a consensus on this matter at all. If you relicense BSD code as GPL, then consumers needn't abide by the GPL; they can simply opt to use the original license. Does that really mean a relicensing has occurred? Of course, in non-trivial cases, there's likely additional code that has been intermixed with the original code, which would make it impossible to separate. But the release of the GPL code would still technically need to comply with the BSD license itself. Even at that point, it doesn't feel like "relicense" is actually correct.

(Note that I picked up on this because I firmly believe that such relicensing is indeed unethical, while simultaneously not knowing whether such relicensing is definitely a violation of copyright law or not, while also believing that copyright law shouldn't exist at all.)

[1] - http://www.marktarver.com/fsf.html

[2] -…

Lisp is a powerful language that allows one to mix multiple logical levels within a program (especially through it's homoiconicity).

Shrdlu is perhaps the most classic illustration of Lisp's power[1], A classic program from 1968-70 that allowed natural language communication about a micro world. It was written in a version of Lisp even more free-form than today. When I looked at the source code a while back, it's parsing of natural language involved a wide-variety of on-the-fly fix-ups and such to take into account the multiple irregularities of human language.

The thing about Lisp's power is it allows the production of complex program quickly but doesn't particularly have a standard way of gluing these programs together. The other classic Lisp work, The Bipolar Lisp Programmer[2], describes how Lisp has multiple partial implementations of important libraries and programs simply because it allows a certain type of personality to by themselves produce something that's remarkably good but doesn't encourage any particular group effort.

Lisp is certainly evidence that "language matters" but not evidence that Lisp is where one should stop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

[2] http://marktarver.com/bipolar.html

It is perhaps useful to understand where the author is coming from.

The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of articles detailing criticisms of open source software.

http://marktarver.com/problems.html (The Problems of Open Source)
http://marktarver.com/open.html (In Praise of Closed Source)

He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source. He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's capability of understanding the language).

He has also had at least one argument on Reddit about this (see the post by Mark_Tarver here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing_against_opensource_shen_programming/).

This is one article in a long series of events and thoughts for him that have played out over the past decade.

Nowhere did I claim ADHD was a personality quirk. Nowhere did I claim ADHD wasn't real. I'm not disputing the neurodevelopmental pathophysiology of ADHD. I'm questioning the labels society applies to people with such a disorder.

I claimed it's not the "attention deficit" people think it is. People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them. That's a huge contradiction. The truth is probably that school is way too boring for them.

I think signal to noise ratio is a good analogy. People with ADHD are easily distracted by noisy stimuli and need disproportionally high signal to focus. Society consistently fails to provide high enough SNR then labels neurodivergent people as problematic.

ADHD discussions always remind me of this article:

https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

I think the bipolar diagnosis is off the mark. Substitute bipolar with ADHD though and the profile fits quite well.