You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.

@athas False, except *maybe* for later Forth. Unix was always "do abstraction layers perfectly or not at all".

I've seen *vast* quantities of bitching about Unix scripting and it *never* turns into anything better. The best you get is PowerShell which is... a thing. (Yes, I know about nushell; no, I don't want to argue about it.)

(And as for Lisp, an army of Lisp weenies is currently tracking you down. I suggest changing your name and running into the wilderness.)

@StompyRobot @suetanvil

Pretty much any problem is easier to implement in Lisp or Forth, because reflection is a first-class feature of both languages.

@athas @suetanvil "refusing to solve the difficult problem and realising you can get away with it" is exactly what software engineering is about. a lot of "difficult problems" turn out to be seventeen simple problems in a trenchcoat, and you only need to solve the one that applies to you; conversely, sometimes *over*generalising a difficult problem turns it into a simpler one - there's a couple of examples of that in Thinking Forth

the point isn't to shy away from the difficult problem, but not to take it at face value - to prod at it until you're absolutely certain you need to solve exactly all of it.

You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.

Lisp is six functions. Forth is 200 bytes. Unix is just tiny programs and text files. The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. And yet, it does *that*.

The huge, complex stuff--Windows, Java, the modern web--is all the work of mediocre thinkers with big budgets and too little time.

You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.

Lisp is six functions. Forth is 200 bytes. Unix is just tiny programs and text files. The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. And yet, it does *that*.

The huge, complex stuff--Windows, Java, the modern web--is all the work of mediocre thinkers with big budgets and too little time.

@millihertz @suetanvil I think the main lesson is to say "no, that problem is not worth solving 'properly'". Especially if the cost of solving it is high. That doesn't require computer genius; it mostly requires stubbornness and ego. Saying no to features is hard.