Subject: Re: superior(?) programming languages From: Erik Naggum <news@naggum.no> Date: 1996/12/18 Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3059870825688725@naggum.no> * Adam Alpern | I've written many hundreds of thousands of lines of Common Lisp without | ever calling eval once - and this was in dynamic, end-user programmable | environments (class & prototype based visual programming systems, highly | parallel blackboard systems with integrated rule engines), defining new | classes and methods on the fly, etc... at first I was impressed by this, but it didn't match the contents of your article so I ignored it. then I looked you up on the Web, and found that you have just (as of 1996-07-02) graduated from Hampshire College, and that you don't mention this work in your resume. at full speed, I write about 1 line of Lisp code per minute, including think time. "many hundreds of thousands of lines of Common Lisp" would translate, for me, into many hundreds of thousands of minutes, if we make the invalid assumption that I can sustain this speed for a whole day at a time. suppose now that we have 500 minutes a day available for programming Lisp, and suppose that "many" means more than 5, we can safely assume that you have been working on this system full time for at least three years, five if you take vacations and weekends off. this flies in the face of your resume, and must therefore be assumed to be an utterly foolish lie on your part. next time you feel a desire to brag like that, update your resume first. <URL:http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~adaF92/Home.html> <URL:http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~adaF92/Resume.html> as for some real numbers, when I stopped writing C for fun and profit three years go, at about the time you entered college. I estimated that I had _written_ about a million lines of code over the preceding 15 years, but published (i.e., made available to more than 10 people, either as source or compiled code) less than a tenth of that. I can hope to have published "many hundreds of thousands of lines of Common Lisp" when I celebrate my 40th anniversary. I would consider that a real achievement. I regret that I wasted time on finding this information, but I would have liked to know somebody who had written many hundreds of thousands of lines of Common Lisp. #\Erik -- users should be computer-friendly.