Friends/Romans/Readers:
I’m going to Moscow next week to give a talk at the New Economic School (probably Saturday, May 13). I will arrive at 0400 on Sunday morning, May 7 in order to begin the de-jetlag process. If any of you would like to meet for coffee or to sight-see, I would be grateful.
Please email me, philg@mit.edu, if you’re going to be in Moscow between May 7 and May 14.
Thanks in advance.
(Also, if you have any advice for the first-time visitor to Moscow please post it here in the comments section. I’m staying pretty close to Red Square and don’t want to venture too far afield.)
Phil, I must ask are you too a secret agent of Putin? I have noticed you have not been as critical of Trump as many others in academia (despite the fact that you routinely call him the Trumpenfuherer). Is there something going on here?
Sam: I’m not sure what Donald Trump, or any other U.S. President, can actually do. He or she can propose a budget, for example, but Congress actually sets and passes a budget. The President can propose a tax rate change, but Congress sets the tax rates. When I see my Facebook friends or nytimes commenters attacking Trump it is typically either (a) a state-level issue over which no Federal official has much control (e.g., schools), or (b) something for which Congress is ultimately responsible.
Trump has appointed a Supreme Court Justice, right? The guy was seemingly qualified, having been previously an appeals court judge (like Trump’s sister), according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch (But even for this, Congress could have rejected Trump’s nomination so it is really the Senate that we should hold responsible for Gorsuch being on the Supreme Court.)
Trump has repealed some last-minute changes to regulations made by President Obama, but I managed to live for 53 years in the U.S. without any of the regulations that were repealed so how can I get excited about that?
Trump said that not all scientists should be worshiped as heroes? That’s a lot less harsh than what a scientist himself said in http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”)!
If Trump were to say that C++ is a better programming language than Common Lisp, certainly I would be knitting a hat and training for a long protest march!
So in other words yes, you and the Trumpenfuherer are both working for Putin! Have a great time in Russia and do try to make a few blog posts. It should be interesting!
I would recommend Tretyakov Gallery, an art museum within walking distance of Kremlin. Has Russian art on display, from early days of Christianity to avant garde of 1920s. Nice extra — it’s in the middle of a historic district that was miraculously spared destruction both in Soviet times and in the development frenzy of 2000s.
Too funny Phil, I don’t think I would be buying any yarn soon.
Presidents can sign Executive Orders (didn’t King Obama effectively stop pipelines by doing this?). Of course they can use the Antiquities Act to set aside land for National Monuments (except in Wyoming, fascinating history here), seems like one of the more powerful things they can do. Of course, as Commander in Chief they can rain missiles on countries.
I would hope though that to encourage STEM in the US, Trumpenfuhrer would declare a National Programmers Day!
Lisp and Scheme are dumb and impractical and if you ever hire people who are excited about them then your company will fail.
@bobbybobbob
Paul Graham’s et al development of what became Yahoo Stores (in Lisp) appears to contradict your assertion. Then again, Yahoo! did fail, albeit 20 years or so after acquiring Paul’s startup.
>but I managed to live for 53 years in the U.S.
>without any of the regulations that were
>repealed so how can I get excited about that?
You also managed to live for several decades without flying helicopters, yet I suspect you might get excited if the government revoked your pilots license.
Hey Phil,
Enjoy Moscow. I’ve been there multiple times in the last 15 years. Hopefully you will get nice weather, not a blizzard (but be prepared). I’m assuming you will have a local guide to show you around. Ask them if they can take you to the aviation museum or the space museum. With advance notice, it’s usually easy. Try the local food and drink (borscht, pelmeni, shashlik, vodka). Walk around Red Square, visit GUM, and the museum inside the Kremlin is worth seeing. If you need to go somewhere in the city, just flag down any car on the street and show them on your phone where you need to go. In Moscow, every car is a taxi (I think they also have Uber now). Have a drink at “Night Flight” if you are feeling adventurous. Riding the Metro is a true Moscow experience; you might want to have your local host show you how.
Liam.
While we’re on the topic, did Stephen Colbert end his career last night?
#1 is already obvious: Red Square/Kremlin which you will be close to anyway
#2 Ride the metro to visit the stations – there is no other like it on earth (Picture Vienna, but underground!). Not as super deep as the ones in St.Petersburg, but far more impressive by the decoration. Hats off to Stalin.
#3 Another vote for the space museum from me. A good reminder of all the ‘first in space’ events that you might have forgotten. There is also the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, with a statue of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
btw, not that I would do it, but according to Russia Flight Adventures you can do a “Ultra High and Suborbital Flights on a real MIG-29”, only $13,000
http://russiaflightadventures.com/en/mig-29/
I was hoping that the Helicopter tour would be in a Hind II (Mi-24) helicopter, but it looks like your average heli.
It’s in foreign policy that the President has greatest freedom of action. Watching Trump as he tries to deal with China, North Korea, and the Middle East reminds me of what you said about the venture capitalists trying to run ArsDigita (“like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off”).
The New Yorker quotes Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank: “We’ve never lived in a Third World banana republic [before]. I don’t mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise.”
P.S. try Russian perogies (they look like empanadas / hotpockets that you eat with your hands). Good stuff.
Also, buy a neck brace – if you’re like me your neck will hurt from so much turning to look at russian beauties.
Yahoo immediately rewrote Yahoo Stores in php and C++. Apparently the mess of macro heavy Lisp was practically useless to anyone but Paul Graham.
Probably when Graham wrote the store editor in the 90s other tools sucked enough that lisp wasn’t a horrible choice. But in today’s world you can be certain that anyone babbling on at length about lisp or haskell will destroy a project.
Supposedly there are several great museums in Moscow.
Can you go see where napoleon slept?
I hate to admit that Bobby is right about Lisp, but Yahoo! Store doesn’t seem to be a compelling example for Lisp. One of the authors of Naviserver/AOLserver was tasked with building a similar multi-homed web-administered store for AOL’s Primehost division. It had most of the features of Viaweb/Yahoo! Store and was developed mostly by one guy over a 4-month period in SQL (the important stuff) and C/Tcl (Web front-end). I don’t think that a Lisp programmer could have done it any faster.
If Group X is being underpaid for doing the same work, we should expect to find companies thriving due to a workforce of only Group X members. By the same logic, if Lisp makes programmers significantly more productive and results in better code we should expect to find market-dominating software companies offering Lisp applications. But we don’t!
Not only you can go to see where he slept you can actually stay there. It’s hotel now. Pretty good one.
I think the Philip’s maxim that any sufficiently complex iterative procedural language program ends up semi-implementing common Lisp features still stands, at least this has been my experience. But now closures first introduced in Lisp made their way up to more mainstream languages. And they are widely used, it is hard to imagine modern programming without closures, also it is possible, instead relying on other abstractions. Online store does not seem as an example of a very complex software. Usually systems that implement RDBS based business logic must be maintained by large IT departments with limited programming skillset. Such system usually suffer from disk space constraints and need to be constantly tinkered with, due to proliferation of multi-parameter criteria that result in widely different execution plans from call to call.
Any sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of the relational model and disk persistence.
ecoysystem trumps language
Agree, bobbybobbob # 20. I did not intend to contrast Lisp and RDBMS as competing solutions, I wanted to note that Lisp features are being used extensively in other programming languages and that relational data store is not the right medium to implement complex business logic. RDBMS can serve as a convenient data store and data model.
Stating the obvious – don’t miss the May 9 Victory parade along the Tverskaya str – pretty scary. AND May 9 Victory fireworks. One of the best places to watch fireworks is on a bridge next to Baltschug Kempinski. Do visit Moscow subway, some stations are quite amazing, e.g. Sretenskiy bulvar, Trubnaya, Mayakovskaya, etc. I’d give you a tour and invite you to stop by the Moscow hackerspace, but I’m out of the town 🙁
Hey, turns out alt-bobby is a programmer, and an opinionated one at that! How come so many programmers are butthurt over race?
I liked the Cosmonautics museum, it’s only a half hour away via Metro from Red Square. Also if you know a local, Muzey Tekhniki Vadima Zadorozhnogo which is near Arkhangelskoye. Fantastic military museum.
Too bad you came in Moscow in the midst of worst weather for years.
As what to do – I strongly recommend a stroll here – https://www.google.ru/maps/place/Tsentralnyy+dom+khudozhnika/@55.7364236,37.6087424,15.19z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x10568d465ae98d58!8m2!3d55.7349092!4d37.6058793?hl=en
The place is nice and you will be able to enjoy probably worst sculptural monument ever (Peter the Great). Also, there is good exgibition going on now – Оттепель (Thaw). If you are goin to follow my advice, message me and I will probably able to accompany you.