Top all-time · #2199
Mark Tarver
Personal blog · marktarver.comprogrammingphilosophy
Mark Tarver writes mark tarver, a personal blog at marktarver.com about programming and philosophy. Since 2015, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-05-27
- The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-01-17
- /bipolar.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-03-30
- /professor.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-24
- The Bipolar Lisp Programmer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-21
- Shen and Wikipedia – In Defence of Open Science2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-11
- Free as in 'Do as You're Told': Evaluating the Thinking of Richard M. Stallman2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-15
- /professor.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-10
What Hacker News says?
> School needs to fundamentally change especially for adolescent males, it just stacks the decks against the high functioning learn by doing types. The point of school is to teach discipline and grit - the subjects in and of themselves are merely incidental. Do you really think that these "great minds" - the kids who can't sit through a lecture and half-ass everything off of natural talent alone - would be doing gre…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “I should have loved biology”Submitted The Cathedral and the Bizarre as a story · 107 points
HN discussionLisp 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 pa…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007) as a story · 61 points
HN discussion> There must be some reason Lisp is so popular on HN. sicp is a really good book, but also: https://marktarver.com/bipolar.html
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “Show HN: Lisp with GC in 436 Bytes”Submitted The limits of ChatGPT: a week of interaction and AI research as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNowhere 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…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes”Submitted Open Source Is Ceasing to Be Cool as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThose companies are so high-profile, with so many people wanting to work for them, that they can do what they want, and the new hires will keep coming. But in an obscure company, especially one that's not very well funded, it may make sense to use a blub language so the company can attract programmers that it can afford. Of course, using a less powerful language will limit the productivity of those programmers. But…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “The Programming Language Conundrum”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship. Not the ones per Mark Trevor's words ( https://marktarver.com/professor.html ), of course, but a self-respecting university will train their students with progressively challenging and practical assignments. We started with implemen…
Comment linking /professor.html
on “"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education”Submitted Shen and Wikipedia – In Defence of Open Science as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe author, Dr. Mark Tarver, is perhaps best known for the essay The Bipolar Lisp Programmer : https://marktarver.com/bipolar.html If you want to jump straight into what makes Shen interesting, read Part 10 of the manual, starting with recursive types: https://shenlanguage.org/OSM/Recursive.html
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “The Shen Programming Language”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell I can relate to that kind of story, although I got it mostly out of my system by college. I took one CS class as well. I didn't read the syllabus carefully, and thus didn't realize that the lab was 10% of my grade, so I got a final score of 89%. I tried to argue that getting 99% of the rest of the course right should make up for the missing lab work, to no avail. This is how I ended up a chemistry major. Anyway…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “Main is usually a function, so when is it not? (2015)”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThinking colleges don't matter at all in tech is another extreme. It's like saying one should not go to college at all because Carmack didn't and was very successful. Not everyone is autodidactic. Many people do need structured and well paced training. It is ordinary people who suffer in their career when schools lower their standard. See Mark Tarver's article on this: http://www.marktarver.com/professor.html And sp…
Comment linking /professor.html
on “Make School Hard Again”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionStandards have been lowered. Here’s a perspective from someone who used to be a tenured lecturer in the UK: http://www.marktarver.com/professor.html
Comment linking /professor.html
on “Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class”Submitted The Cathedral and the Bizarre as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI 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 virtua…
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" Presumably, you are referring to The Bipolar Lisp Programmer[1], an HN classic[2]. [1] https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bipolar+lisp+programmer
Comment linking /bipolar.html
on “The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSee also: http://marktarver.com/free-as-in-do-as-your-told.html
Comment linking /free-as-in-do-as-your-told.html
on “The Cathedral and the Bizarre”Submitted Free as in 'Do as You're Told': Evaluating the Thinking of Richard M. Stallman as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt 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 configu…
Comment linking /open.html
on “The Cathedral and the Bizarre”Submitted The Bipolar Lisp Programmer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo me this illustrates that your CS undergrad school wasn't very good [1]. In my experience (CS at CMU), it's the undergrad years that are the most brutal and require the most (assuming you strive for excellence and not just passing). I've had friends and coworkers who went to MIT, Caltech and Stanford pretty much agree with this. Those of us who continued to graduate and postgraduate studies, have (generally) found…
Comment linking /professor.html
on “College as an incubator of Girardian terror”Submitted The Problems of Open Source (2009, 2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
