The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem

Re:The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem by WillAdams on Thursday November 05, 2026 @01:01PM (#50382196)

When worldwideweb.app was first being developed an the RFCs and so forth for web servers and protocols were being discussed, one of the sticking point was what to call a URL --- the initial suggestion was "Universal Resource Locator", but the argument was made that users and writers were not librarians and that the distributed nature would preclude a given web page having a universally agreed-upon location and name, so instead the present "Uniform Resource Locator" was adopted.

What if there was a code sharing site where it was unambiguous what a given snippet of code would be named and where it would be stored, so that a user could just browse it and find a list of implementations for a given problem?

This of course runs up against one what John Ousterhout notes is one of the most difficult problems in computer science --- naming things --- in his book:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

I've tried to do it on a small-scale with my own work, storing bits of (la).tex code in a single file, but on reviewing it, I'll often find that I have written a given solution a second time and given the macro a slightly different name....

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Re:The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem by skydhash on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:23PM (#50383980)

The thing is, solutions related to computing techniques, are few and can be found in algorithm textbooks. Some are then put into standard libraries.

Almost everything else is domain specific where you have to understand the domain first before understanding the code. And modeling a domain is all about tradeoffs between accuracy, performance, specific vs generic,…

Instead of collecting such solutions, a better approach is to master basic data structures, and then improve your modeling capabilities. After that, it’s mostly learning domain as they come (dsp, physic modeling, operating system concepts, relational database, graph theory, 3D geometry, accounting,…)

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Re:The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem by WillAdams on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:40PM (#50386678)

I am currently (re)reading Niklaus Wirth's book on data structures, and trying to work through the new Knuth fascicle on Constraint Satisfaction --- the idea here was that one could have a repository which one could search through to see/compare existing solutions as an alternative to using an existing library.

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