I use it a lot for my one man projects; it is really fantastic in that setting. I use SBCL exclusively; it is very fast and robust and has image based development. I have my own versioning toolkit so I don't go insane.
It is obvious why it is not really used or recommended as it really falls flat in a team setting, mostly even when 2 people are involved. But fixing bugs live as they happen and then spitting out a new .exe for clients is still a lot faster than modern alternatives. Far more dangerous too.
What makes you think it falls flat in a team setting? There are plenty of N-pizza-sized teams successfully using Lisp to this day and you're probably aware of many teams successfully using Lisp in the past, too. There's also the success of Clojure. What's required to have a well functioning team is mostly programming language independent; Lisp itself won't save a team lacking those properties anymore than say Java would.
Did you even read what I said or who I responded to? I am specifically talking about working inside an image, monkey patching functions and structures live in the running image. A practice almost no one uses anymore and of which I said that as a single dev on a project I use and find convenient, but I would not want to use it in a team; for that, modern workflows with versioning, beaming code, ci/cd, dev containers etc are preferred.
I prefer lisp over most other things in life, and so does my team. I was specifically not talking about the language though.
One of my early gigs was in a, for my country and the standards at the time (90s), large factory; they ran almost everything on Excel and Access. From the erp, hrm, crm, entry gates, phone system, truck loading bays, industrial systems if they could be accessed via Windows, cafetarias PoSs etc. VBA plugged into everything with the sysadmin doing 'version management' of 1000s of evolving data mixed with code files on networking (Novell I think when I was there) shares. They kept that up for quite a while until the sysadmin got ill; I was there to fix some issues in Access because he could not do it fulltime now. They replaced everything for far more expensive and inflexible erp and control software; it did no longer depend on one person working 247 though.
What evolution in particular do you think? The developers use it for commercial products in quantum computing and defense [1]. That doesn't mean it's done in some complete language ecosystem sense (which is discussed in [1], and one could argue Haskell also never feels "finished"), but it also doesn't seem like an unfinished hobby project. Given that it's embedded in Common Lisp, there's always a way to fill in the library gaps, sort of like how if a "native" library doesn't exist in Clojure, one can always reach for Java.
[1] From Toward Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Software in Common Lisp at the European Lisp Symposium, "[Coalton] has been used for the past 5 or so years [...] first in quantum computing and now a serious defense application." https://youtu.be/xuSrsjqJN4M&t=9m14s
I am an avid sbcl and coalton user (and sponsor of both when I can) and never said it was not a great thing; comparing it to Haskell is, outside the theoretical type system roots, just a bit early type system wise.
I agree with you further and you did an excellent promotional comment for Coalton and CL; keep doing that please. I have said many times here before that I did not like my time away from CL and Coalton makes it even better.
The only good thing I get from all the calling out on the decline of Claude (in this case managed agents which I do not use) is anthropic (accidentally or not) giving me basically unlimited use; for a week or so my /usage does not move anymore and I always had claude running in a loop writing code to make our many tests succeed, which can take days; before it would run out of tokens and then pick up again after the window passed until it ran out of weekly use; now I have at least one task (well, claude code instance let's say; the task is to debug and fix the code until the tests pass) thats been running 48+ hours non stop and it says usage is 10% for all of that period. Anyone else noticed? After the crash in usage a month or so ago, this is the opposite.
I saw academic rigor fall of a cliff in exchange for 'better job alignment' between end 80s when I had my first class after finishing highschool called 'Formal verification in software' on to beginning of the 2000s when I left giving the first class to new students 'Programming in Java'. All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.
> All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.
Yeah. Companies didn't want to train new employees any more as that costs money (both for paying the trainees and the teachers) so they shifted to requiring academic degrees. That in turn shifted the cost to students (via student loans) and governments.
People call it a red flag for scams if you are supposed to pay your employer for training or whatever as a condition of getting employed... but the degree mill system is conveniently ignored.
The problem was the government providing the blank check loans with no underwriting. Without that subsidy from future taxpayers, incentives would be properly aligned.
No lender would have been stupid enough to give 18 to 22 year olds $200k for bullshit degrees and sports facilities.
The onus would have remained on employers and government to pay for education, rather than a certification, because they would have been the ones paying.
College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
I recently spoke to a young art school grad who talked about getting on disability over a life of the corporate grind.
Who am I to disagree ? The Pentagon has never passed an audit, the government coffers are effectively a slush fund for defense contractors.
At this point, I think a universal basic income is the only way.
Not enough jobs exist for everyone. Poverty doesn’t need to exist
>College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
Not unless you were willing to compete on price against people in China learning the same advanced trades.
No, I search a few YouTube videos, and buy less than $100 of tools and supplies that were made in China from Home Depot, and fix the issue. Or a plumber uses tools and supplies made in China to fix the issue.
“Advanced trades” would be making and fixing the machines used to make the tools and supplies to fix the leak.
But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.
"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)
Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.
With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.
These are good point and I am not overestimating; we are simply seeing the productivity boost in our company and the rise in profitability. We practice TDD, but only at integration level, so we have tests upfront for api and frontend and the AI writes until it works. SOTA models are simply good enough not to do;
function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers
test: add(1,2)=3
to implement
function add(a,b) return 3
So when you have enough tests (and we do), it will deliver quality. Having AI write the tests is mostly useless. But me writing the code is not necessarily better and certainly not faster for most cases our clients bring us.
I am confused why you would write a public article about it as a financial company. But I have many things I am confused about here; I cannot really figure what they do that requires 800 people or how 130m tx/y is anything to boast about in itself. But maybe it is fantastic; I don't know.
You want to keep on topic, so explain in a business-sense way how this acquisition makes sense? Cursor has no moat, just a lot of clients. If spacex would clone vscode, plop in Grok and and advertise it on X as subscription included with your X sub, they would immediately have more clients. Why pay this type of money for that if he is so clever? It is a question; maybe there is a reason, it just looks incredibly skewed towards cursor; they are the big winners with spacex overpaying a large margin for something that does not seem to make a lot of sense?
My argument isn't that I have insider information or even any meaningful knowledge or experience with literally billion dollar acquisitions and investments. My argument is that you don't either, and almost no one does, and Elon doesn't really have a track record of making decisions that have no explanation behind them - even if that basis is sometimes ideological rather than profit maximizing (buying twitter).
Elon is problematic in many ways and despite the cool things his companies do, I think he is also causing harm. However, he is not an idiot, he is very business savvy, he does things for real reasons, and if you're going to speculate that he's being an idiot and making a stupid decision, then I think it needs an argument of substance that actually understands the factors at play in spending billions of dollars on buying a company. Which I don't think either of us are equipped to provide.
Saying "this doesn't make sense" is basically an admission that it isn't understood, rather than evidence that Elon is being an idiot.
It is fair, however, people who are too big too fail have a lot of leeway after their brain goes. I think it could be an explanation as well. But we indeed do not know; don't have nor want billions. People like that definitely live in another world.
I don't see any evidence that Elon's brain is "going" and in fact he's literally more successful than ever - and more than almost anyone in history. Which isn't me trying to kiss his ass but rather just a statement of facts that anyone can see by looking at the net worth scoreboard. If we saw any evidence of senility or brain rot or whatever people want to accuse him of, then sure, maybe there can be room for "maybe Elon is starting to make truly idiotic business decisions".
I do agree wealth does cause brain rot and even the people trying to be most self-aware about it still fall victim to their bubbles and egos. I think Elon shows this plenty is many aspects of his life, but business is not one of them.
It is obvious why it is not really used or recommended as it really falls flat in a team setting, mostly even when 2 people are involved. But fixing bugs live as they happen and then spitting out a new .exe for clients is still a lot faster than modern alternatives. Far more dangerous too.
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