raganwald
(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)

Friday, July 20, 2007
  Friday Morning Surprise Essay Question


Compare and contrast:

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.
—Jeff Atwood

Lisp is a Black Hole: if you try to design something that’s not Lisp, but like Lisp, you’ll find that the gravitational forces on the design will suck it into the Black Hole, and it will become Lisp.
—Attributed to Guy Steele

To become popular, a programming language has to be the scripting language of a popular system.
—Paul Graham, Being Popular
  9:13 AM

Comments on “Friday Morning Surprise Essay Question”:
Well, Javascript never left that gravitational well, or did it?
# posted by Anonymous Florian Hars : 9:59 AM
 
Well there's only one conclusion to be drawn. Javascript and Lisp are slowly becoming one and the same! It's like Clark Kent and Superman.
# posted by Anonymous Haacked : 10:44 AM
 
No, it means both are local maxima.
# posted by Anonymous beza1e1 : 11:06 AM
 
Bonus points: bring in JSON vs. CORBA.
# posted by Blogger Giles Bowkett : 12:16 PM
 




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Reg Braithwaite


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Homoiconic Technical Writing / raganwald.posterous.com

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What I‘ve Learned From Failure / Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity

Share
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The unary ampersand in Ruby / (1..100).inject(&:+) / The challenge of teaching yourself a programming language / The significance of the meta-circular interpreter / Block-Structured Javascript / Haskell, Ruby and Infinity / Closures and Higher-Order Functions

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Why Apple is more expensive than Amazon / Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth / Is software the documentation of business process mistakes? / We have lost control of the apparatus / What I’ve Learned From Sales I, II, III

Whimsey
The Narcissism of Small Code Differences / Billy Martin’s Technique for Managing his Manager / Three stories about The Tao / Programming Language Stories / Why You Need a Degree to Work For BigCo

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