Top all-time · #2299
Chas Emerick
Personal blog · cemerick.comprogramming
Chas Emerick is a personal blog at cemerick.com about programming. Since 2010, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-05-04
- Results of the 2012 State of Clojure survey4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-08-06
- Starting Clojure (mk. 2)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-05-03
- Hosting Maven Repos on Github3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-24
- Why MIT now uses python instead of scheme for its undergraduate CS program3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-11-11
- Enabling rich(er) interactions in the Clojure REPL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-26
- Flowchart for choosing the right Clojure type definition form2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-05
- Results of the 2013 State of Clojure and ClojureScript survey2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-11-18
What Hacker News says?
A few years when MIT switched from SICP/Scheme to Python, Sussman had this to say: "I asked him whether he thought that the shift in the nature of a typical programmer’s world minimizes the relevancy of the themes and principles embodied in scheme. His response was an emphatic ‘no’; in the general case, those core ideas and principles that scheme and SICP have helped to spread for so many years are just as important…
Comment linking /2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/
on “Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP”Submitted 100% time as a story · 191 points
HN discussionI've heard that actually students who had never programmed before did better with SICP than students that had. You have to un-learn a lot of habits from imperative languages when you start working with Scheme. Total novices could take the material as it was presented, but people who had programmed before often tried to shoehorn it into the C/Java/PHP paradigm they'd already experienced and ended up fighting the lang…
Comment linking /2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/
on “Not Lisp again (2009)”Submitted Starting Clojure (mk. 2) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionThe things he said about the Clojure community are in contradiction with the data from the 2012 State of Clojure survey here: http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-... . Steve claims that Clojure folks come from the Haskell/ML world when the survey lists the "former primary language" of survey takers to be 1% Haskell, 0% SML, 0% Ocaml. Whereas they actually come from Java, Python and Ruby mostl…
Comment linking /2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/
on “Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus”Submitted Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009) as a story · 131 points
HN discussionI think Christophe's is the talk, and Yegge seriously misunderstood it, if he even bothered to watch it. Christophe's point was that basing the underpinnings of a DSL on macros was frequently a mistake, vs a data + functions approach that "leads to greater dynamicity". It is inarguable that macros are less flexible than functions (e.g. they can't be applied) and less composable. Christophe's argument wasn't against…
Comment linking /2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/
on “Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus”Submitted Results of the 2012 State of Clojure survey as a story · 125 points
HN discussion> I think it's worth pointing out why the author's of SICP themselves acknowledge why it was phased out. Gerald Sussman made some remarks about this during an unrelated roundtable discussion at the 2009 International Lisp Conference: https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inst... Note that Sussman did not actually state why the committee decided to change the curriculum. The remarks about studying s…
Comment linking /2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/
on “If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?”Submitted Results of the 2011 State of Clojure survey as a story · 115 points
HN discussionMost Clojure programmers are Java programmers - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-... Even though this is 2 years old it's still the case that the Clojure folks are heavily dominated by users who have already invested in the JVM. The other largest group seems to be split evenly between Python & Ruby as reflected in this survey.
Comment linking /2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/
on “Clojure 2014 Year in Review”Submitted Results of the 2013 State of Clojure and ClojureScript survey as a story · 101 points
HN discussionAnother article on the same topic: > https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inst...
Comment linking /2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/
on “Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009)”Submitted 2012 State of Clojure survey as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI will give my answer, noting that not everyone will agree with me :-). The vast majority of software developers do not put up with Lisp syntax. The vast majority of software developers use a different programming language with a much better syntax, and never consider using Lisp for anything serious. For example, for most developers, a programming language is a laughable nonstarter if it cannot use infix notation fo…
Comment linking /blog/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program.html
on “Why I'm writing a Scheme implementation in 2025: Async Rust”Submitted Oracle VP: “We have a strategy to run Java inside a Javascript environment” as a story · 74 points
HN discussionI agree it's creepy (just another great reason to continue not using Facebook), but I don't agree that it's creepy because people can see you in context. I think it's creepy because people see everything out of context . Those drunken photos, random pissed-off status update, smattering of professional news, and "Lost a loved one" updates followed by a photostream of your grandmother's funeral form a stilted caricatu…
Comment linking /2011/04/05/opa/
on “The Facebook Timeline is creepy as hell”Submitted Early rev of 'Clojure Programming' book from O'Reilly now available as a story · 63 points
HN discussionIf you have a better workflow, by all means use it and share it with us. If you want to see a community-oriented look at Clojure based on self-reported data, I'd suggest the 2013 State of Clojure: http://cemerick.com/2013/11/18/results-of-the-2013-state-of-... I think you'll find considerable diversity in Clojure. You've got a confluence of people coming from Java, Ruby, Lisp, and other languages. You've got enterpr…
Comment linking /2013/11/18/results-of-the-2013-state-of-clojure-clojurescript-survey/
on “Why I'm Productive in Clojure”Submitted The 2011 State of Clojure Survey is Open as a story · 60 points
HN discussionIt was a blog about Clojure 6 years ago; 2003 is too far back. https://web.archive.org/web/20100415161333/http://muckandbra... In 2011, it was redirected to this blog, which is still live: https://cemerick.com/
Comment linking /
on “Websites That Feed Hacker News: Top Sources of Submissions by Median Score”Submitted A Clojure "Scholarship": Let’s send Raynes to the Conj as a story · 57 points
HN discussionReading a short account of the rationale behind the change, described by Sussman himself, paints a very different picture: http://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inste... . It's not that programming now "largely consists of debugging and customizing already existing code, often via frameworks". For one thing, it's only the narrow, web-constrained definition of "framework" that even vaguely works that…
Comment linking /2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/
on “Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]”Submitted ‘Clojure Programming’ book finished as a story · 45 points
HN discussionWorking on it: http://cemerick.com/2011/10/26/enabling-richer-interactions-... In a heterogeneous mix of tools, getting the channel right is a big part of the challenge. Lots of the interactivity is going to be client-specific (i.e. what's possible / attractive in Eclipse is different from Emacs/vim/TextMate), but the channel underneath is a big enabler. Would love to hear what you have in mind specifically, if only…
Comment linking /2011/10/26/enabling-richer-interactions-in-the-clojure-repl/
on “Can your REPL do this?”Submitted Ashton’s plight, fight or flight or "self-righteous metropolitan exceptionalism" as a story · 41 points
HN discussion(If you watched the O'Reilly live webcast, then give this a try: http://cemerick.com/2012/05/02/starting-clojure/ ) Riffing on what technomancy said nearby, a lot of the issues that Clojure addresses are so taken for granted in most of the broader software development world, that it can be challenging to wrap up its benefits into a tasty, easily digestable nugget comparable to "Java gets rid of malloc and pointers"…
Comment linking /2012/05/02/starting-clojure/
on “2012 State of Clojure survey”Submitted Scala isn’t complicated; it’s clever as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSome of us have been "marketing" Clojure for a number of years now. :-) The results from the last two years of the survey (e.g. 2011's are here: http://cemerick.com/2011/07/11/results-of-the-2011-state-of-... ) might be illuminating for you. Clojure has a ton of compelling use cases, but it's stubbornly not going to fit into the shoebox of a single domain. Thus, it's going to be hard to say, "Clojure is great becaus…
Comment linking /2011/07/11/results-of-the-2011-state-of-clojure-survey/
on “2012 State of Clojure survey”Submitted Cargo-culting to success and understanding as a story · 26 points
HN discussion
