Path: csiph.com!news.nrbbs.org!border-3.nntp.ord.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:30:54 +0000 From: steve g Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Resources to learn common lisp? References: <874inbqdz7.fsf@mariorosell.es> <110i789$2iqm8$7@dont-email.me> <110j4qk$2q1p4$1@dont-email.me> <110l0v9$3av52$1@dont-email.me> <110nf0q$3vra6$3@dont-email.me> <87y0gg62cx.fsf@nightsong.com> <110rfqf$142ot$1@dont-email.me> <111ne5o$vsm3$3@dont-email.me> <111pbk6$36pi7$1@dont-email.me> <111sb7u$3ua8h$7@dont-email.me> <111t73h$6a1k$1@dont-email.me> <1126vrf$31p54$4@dont-email.me> <87wludtv85.fsf@gmail.com> <114e3qf$18m2n$12@dont-email.me> <877bm5ux0t.fsf@gmail.com> <1150bqc$3blde$8@dont-email.me> <87zeyuvru2.fsf@gmail.com> <115bam0$2p9mf$3@dont-email.me> <27258.63260.542826.672225@parhasard.net> Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:30:53 -0400 Message-ID: <874ih0t3pu.fsf@gmail.com> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:3PvBwOvDVSpOWFtpVgLh973ArxQ= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Lines: 142 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-YlotCGmP+OXG+vMGt+3v+d3X3tfAJzjsjBdTrgW7tF6gmxXOSGs4H9oDT2C8YqYOn1ryarZpYcoxCpc!YmUdvEY6mEWOyjPKMdyvgCjZTj24KCdBQS0wU4uJUlBjCNs= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.lisp:61399 Aidan Kehoe writes: > Ar an deichiú lá de mí Lúnasa, scríobh Lawrence D’Oliveiro: > > > On Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:42:29 -0400, steve g wrote: > > > > > [...] GC is for user space, not kernel space. Kernel developers are > > > usually very good programmers. > > > > Do different laws of physics apply in kernel space or something? > > And/or is that an admission that garbage collection is not for “very > > good programmers”? > > Let me digress for a moment: > > Within medicine, my day job, decision making should be and mostly is (absent > resource constraints) guided by what is right for the patient. thank you for your service. > (This sounds obvious but it does need to be re-emphasised and > re-emphasised as part of training, because it is not always intuitive > in the details of every decision made. Every six year old who bumps > his or her head should not have a CT brain, for example.) Now, you can > obviously ask patients (or parents in that last example) what they > feel would be right for the patient, and that is often helpful, but it > is not the case that every patient has thought through every specific > clinical situation before, and it is not the case that every patient > has an informed command of the relevant research. Oh another doctor that has to mention a CT scan. I slipped last winter and hit the back of my head. They took like 10 CT scans over time. They couldn't believe that I was still able to walk. I should mention I weigh 200 pounds and am 5'7" . I believe the purpose of a doctor is to meet the patient at their current level of the disease process. At first I was squirting blood all over the place. So I cortorized the wound by placing my head in snow; while waiting for the ambulance. Once they stapled my head back together they started the CT scans. Point is CT scans before staples is not a good idea. > In practice, you have to develop a mental picture of what is right for almost > everyone. Practically no-one wants to die young (and if they do, practically > none of their family members want them to die young, and practically no-one > continues to want to die young once the twelve Buckfasts have worn off or their > depression is treated). Practically everyone wants to continue to be able to > walk. Practically everyone wants to continue to have control of their bowels > and bladders. Practically no-one wants to have dementia. No-one wants to die of > metastatic cancer. Frail people in their high eighties may not want colonoscopy > if they have a change to their bowel habit with some blood in their stool, and, > if they are unlikely to be fit for treatment of any bowel cancer that is found, > that is very reasonable and it is not a good use of time to attempt to talk > them round to the investigation. we may have a difference of things. It is much easier to lose a child then to lose a teenager. Not to mention they are easier to target. Memory is a bitch. > This becomes more important when the patient is not paying directly for their > care (they are paying through their taxes, or they have health insurance), > since the body that pays for the care is incentivised to minimise > investigations and management. If you are employed directly by the body that > pays for care part of the job is, often and effectively, to market the > investigations and management as necessary to other people in the organisation. sadly this is so true in the USA. I live in New Jersey, "The welfare state". > Digression ended. > > When I returned to software I found it helpful, by analogy to “what is right > for the patient” above, to consider what is right for the end user. yes transference is a bitch. > If there were no resource constraints, a fully informed user aware of what is > possible would like bug-free software that does exactly what is desired as > quickly as the hardware can do it. In mycology (did I mention I am a bit goofy :) they call it senescence. > This would require essentially assembler written with the quality of the Apollo > code, without an operating system. (I’m sure everyone reading this accepts that > good assembler, if it has no bugs, is going to make better use of the hardware > than their language of choice.) This is not going to happen, because we have > resource constraints; no-one is going to pay for that. But it’s helpful to > keep it in mind as a possibility. they actually used a lot of wire wrapping. I've seen some pictures from the outside. It is fucking crazy. > Operating systems, virtual memory, and non-assembler languages are all examples > of tools that make programming less demanding and less likely to have bugs. > This means that the cost (in time and often in money) of developing software to > do a given thing goes down. Portable non-assembler languages have the > additional advantage that the development time can be amortised over multiple > generations of hardware, reducing the cost further. the business world has a mantra, The good programmers will eliminate their job, so you just hire 1000 monkeys to press the keyboard until one of them does it right. > The trade-off is that the resulting software is slower than the above ideal, > and, e.g. that my Windows install decides that it is going to update whether I > like it or not and the Cygwin terminal that I had open, in the middle of > debugging something, with a command history that I would ideally like to have > kept, evaporates. That is assuming you give microsoft your credit card. God bless the free software movement. I am sure many people believe that stallman is crazy; he is sometimes very prophetic. I recommend reading his essay on the right to read. (it has been some time) He basically describes our (USA) current education crisis. The children are not taught to read/write cursive, nor read a clock! It is getting scary; when kids insist that a reality agent is zillow. > The question just becomes what point in the trade-off of increasing development > time versus decreasing does-exactly-what-I-want-making-best-use-of-the-hardware > a given piece of software should make. > > For me, garbage collection as it is actually implemented (I would phrase this > »real existierende Garbage-Collection« in German, by analogy with »real > existierender Sozialismus) has a non-negligible runtime cost. This is usually > acceptable but sometimes not. I leave you with this: ``Quantum Physics and Human Consciousness I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. We can someday replicate that on a machine.'' - Bill Gates in The Most Intriguing People of the Century, p. 101 People Weekly, People Weekly Books, 1997''. I will stay away from my deviance Digression! what a plesant conversation. You just made my day a bit brighter and you did not even tell me to quit smoking cigarettes :) thanx doc.