Muhd comments on Prisoner's Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament - Less Wrong

47 Post author: AlexMennen 07 June 2013 08:30AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (232)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2013 03:24:08AM *  0 points [-]

Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.

Java and Python are much harder to parse than scheme, and the percentage of Java or Python programers who could write a parser for those languages is less than 10%. Furthermore, the ones who could write a parser likely also know Scheme or at least some other lisp dialect.

Comment author: Muhd 25 June 2013 10:42:10PM *  -2 points [-]

Do you have any evidence of this? It seems highly unlikely that the proportion of users of any given programming language that could write a parser would differ by an amount that there are more Scheme users who can write a parser than Java/Python users, given the vastly larger number of users of Java and Python.

For what its worth, python includes its own parser in the standard library, so it would probably be better than scheme in that regard, though I might have to agree with you regarding parsing with Java, though there may very well be a module out there for parsing Java as well.

Comment author: solipsist 26 June 2013 12:51:22AM *  1 point [-]

From experience, I can tell you that it is easier to lean Scheme and write a Scheme interpreter than it is to just understand how Python works on the inside. If you know how Python worked well enough to do static analysis on it, you can learn Scheme in an hour.