The Barnes & Noble locations around Philadelphia have the full Starbucks logo and the full suite of Starbucks products, but there's an easy way to tell it's not a "real" Starbucks. At all of the real Starbucks locations I've visited in the Philadelphia suburbs, the service is fast. Most Barnes & Noble Starbucks shops I've visited have service speeds ranging from slow to painfully slow.
You run your own shop? I see dozens of little computer shops all over, and I wonder how they stay open. I imagine most people smart enough to avoid Best Buy for PC purchases, parts, and tech support would also be smart enough to put everything together on their own.
Do you make a good business out of it, or is it a struggle to make ends meet?
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has made the same suggestion - that big stores switch from being the place where people buy product into showrooms where people examine product, and then have the freedom to buy it right there or go home and order it. If Best Buy, Sears, etc... did that, and maybe added a Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks Kiosk, maybe some of their locations could be profitable for years to come.
But I don't think that's enough to support their entire business model. I don't think Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, Sony, Maytag, etc... all combined would rent enough floor space in Best Buy locations across the country for Best Buy to keep more than a small percentage of its current stores open.
Good point. I've only worked in salaried positions, but three of the four non-cost-of-living raises I've gotten in my twelve year career came because I presented my current employer with a job offer I received from another company. And the only one that wasn't a cost-of-living raise was also the lowest raise I'd ever gotten.
On the other hand, at least around me all of the best paying positions are in financial firms, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, and research to improve targeted advertising. I'm not yet willing to give up my below-average current salary at a company that provides a useful public service (medical research that is not related to selling a drug) in order to work for especially soulless corporations.
It can be done. Your password is hashed once into some random bit of strings and data, and that is used to encrypt your content. Then that hash and your password are concatenated together and hashed again, and that is sent to Google to authenticate you. Google gets a unique secure token to identify you, which nobody can know unless they have your password. But Google doesn't get the original password, so they can't decrypt your data.
A few services supposedly work this way already, like https://spideroak.com/ backup. Supposedly SpiderOak can't read your data at all - but since only most of their source code is open, you have to trust that they're telling the truth. For all we know, it's an NSA front.
Google can end-to-end encrypt Drive and Docs, they can't do that with email, social networking they host, and searches. For email, anything you send or receive goes out in plain text unless you and the recipient use PGP, and they need to read your mail to do spam filtering. For social networking, as long as they host it they need to hold the encryption and decryption keys for when you share with other users. And their search technology works off of plain text communication, I believe (and could be wildly wrong) that it's possible to have an encrypted search engine with encrypted keyword search, but I believe in that case the end user has to encrypt the data before uploading it to the hosting provider. Since Google collects the data to encrypt, not the end users, that won't work.
I want the internet to work the way you're describing, but I don't see it happening soon. Here's hoping that http://yacy.net/en/ (distributed search engine) and http://secushare.org/ (what looks to me like the best hope for true distributed social networking, but it's in its infancy) take off.
You've got half, more or less, of the howto finished. Continuous learning and self improvement is critical.
But the other half is convincing potential employers that you're worth two or three times as much as they pay their average developers (or devops). How do you manage that? Being damn good is only step one, step two is making other people aware of your competence. I'm working on the first, and I think I'm making acceptable progress. The second... that's harder.
Me, I want to telecommute full time making maybe $100k, maybe $130k, somewhere in that range or better. But at my current job we just payed a contractor for some damn good work for $800 per month, and he's based inside the US. It's hard to justify a good paying remote job when someone surprisingly good is willing to work for almost nothing remotely.
I'm not saying it's good that Google and Facebook (and Comcast, and Mastercard, and Verizon, and Sprint, and Bank of America...) turn over data to the government. But I don't think they have a choice.
The best way to protect against having your data harvested is not to let any of those companies hold it. But that's not an easy thing to do.
Vegetarianism is not consistently correlated with a lower obesity level - high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, cane sugar, white flour, and agave nectar are vegan foods. Honey is a vegetarian food. French fries are vegetarian, and can be vegan depending upon what you use to fry them (most fast food restaurants mix some animal fat in their fryers). Cake is vegetarian. Donuts are vegetarian. Hash browns are vegetarian. Soda, apple juice, grapefruit juice, Budweiser, Miller Genuine Draft, Heineken, and Guinness are all vegetarian. Frappuccinos and Milkshakes and triple espresso caramel lattes with whipped cream are vegetarian.
Most studies establishing the health of vegetarianism use the Seventh Day Adventists, who live relatively ascetic lifestyles and don't eat meat but also don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, don't consume caffeinated beverages. Who can say whether avoiding steak does more for their longevity than avoiding Dunkin Donuts?
Aside from eggs and soy flour, most vegetarian foods with high amounts of protein have a lot of carbohydrates or fats along with the protein. You need to eat 600 calories of almonds to get 22 grams of protein. You need an entire pound of vegetarian chili, most legumes, quinoa, or TVP (textured vegetable protein) to get 20-25 grams of protein. That makes it a reasonable task to hit your 50 gram daily recommended allowance from the US government, but 90+% of the fitness guides on the net recommend 1 gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass or more. Some recommend dramatically more. That's hard to hit as a vegetarian and incredibly difficult for vegans.
I think the ability to learn on your own is itself a skill - and an essential one if you want to be good. Get SQL Server Express. Install it. Then use the official web documentation or a highly rated book on it. Start at page 1 and walk through the features. When it gets to a section on setting up foreign keys, use your SQL Server Express to set up foreign keys. When it describes backups, set up backups.
However, this is only half the work required. If he can't point to work experience with SQL Server, then a lot of potential employers don't care what he claims to know from self-study.
Don't get me started.:) We can't tax the wealthy, that would be unfair. We can't raise minimum wages or strengthen unions, that would hurt the economy. Pay not attention to the GDP and corporate profits, if we dared to share even a tiny percentage of them with the proletariat, the world would end.
AMD would do EXACTLY the same thing if the roles were reversed. No-one is innocent here..
And as soon as AMD started abusing a position of power, I would switch to buying Intel or products from some other competing vendor. Until that time, I'm going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt.
I'll check out the books, thank you. I have read some of Paul Graham's blog posts before.
I think a point which you allude to is that most developers aren't willing to travel very far outside their comfort zone to learn something new. I believe James Gosling (the father of Java) said something to the effect that they were trying to pull C++ developers towards Common Lisp, and Java was as far as they could safely go.
Clojure has the practical advantage that it plugs into the JVM ecosystem. That's good for using existing libraries, but it's great for getting Java developers who wouldn't look at Common Lisp to give Clojure a try. Most of the tools in their arsenal (IDEs, Maven, Java Servlet Containers, etc...) are still relevant, so instead of learning a new ecosystem and a new syntax it's just some new syntax. But also, Clojure has immutability by default which you can work around as-needed - which I think is a good default to adapt, and seems to be a nice compromise between Scheme (which if I remember right has immutability everywhere) and Lisp. This could be the thing that pulls enough people into Lisp territory that many developers might get comfortable with Clojure and then decide the next step is Common Lisp. At least that's my hope for me.:)
I also don't think Clojure is "several orders of magnitude slower". If you look at benchmarks between a warm Java Virtual Machine (i.e. one that has executed a program long enough for the just-in-time compilation and optimization to kick in), it often uses dramatically more memory than an equivalent C++ program but generally executes within 2x of the time. ( e.g. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/java.php ) Clojure isn't too far behind Java for performance, so I suspect against most equivalent Lisp applications Clojure is well within one order of magnitude for performance. Since that's nicely ahead of PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl, and those four seem to dominate the internet, I'd say Clojure's performance is adequate.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look at Joy.
My understanding of the benefit of closures - which could be wrong - is that you capture the state of the program at a given point for use later. If that's the main benefit, then immutable objects give you the same benefit with code that's much easier to understand. Is there something else I'm missing?
I realize that the functional features I mentioned are not unique to functional languages. But I think making something idiomatic really is a big help. Maybe I just haven't been around long enough.:) I got started writing software in college in the late 1990s, so the Object Oriented Programming Language craze was in full swing, and I got carried along with it.
Functional programming may be getting more hype than it deserves, but it may not. Most functional programming languages have some aspect of the following three very useful features:
1. A focus on using immutable data objects. In functional languages most functions don't change their input objects, they construct a new output. That lets you reason more easily about your program - if x is 5 in the current scope, it's staying 5, period, and you don't have to worry that you're using it after some other part of your program changed it to 42.
2. A focus on functions with referential transparency - the outputs depend upon the inputs, period, and global state is irrelevant. This makes reasoning about functions, testing functions, and especially re-using functions simpler.
3. Simple syntax for working with higher order functions, lambda functions, partially applied functions, and function currying. You can pass around a function pointer in C or use java.lang.reflect.Methods in Java or anonymous classes, but it's a much heavier syntax for accomplishing some of the same things and the logic of what you are trying to do with the code gets obscured by noisy syntax.
I'm not sure if this means most of us will be using Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/F#/Scala/Clojure in ten years, but I do think some of the swing in this direction is valid, even if it just teaches run of the mill Java, C#, Perl, Python, PHP, etc... developers to use immutable data structures and referentially transparent functions more often.
In general, advanced mathematical topics require you to grapple with abstract concepts and find connections between them, and link them together in ways to accomplish tasks. Any interesting software development (i.e, work that is not "change the color of the login button and move it 7 pixels left") uses the exact same kind of abstract thinking.
So even if you never do multi-variable calculus or ring theory proofs or topology exercises at your job, any time you spend learning those things hones skills you will use at your job.
Interesting. I had to read the wikipedia page on generic functions, because coming from a Java background I first interpreted "generic function" to mean "function that takes inputs that have parameterized types". That's nothing special, and clearly not what you mean.
I guess the interesting but sad question is why Lisp hasn't become the dominant programming language for any application that doesn't require C or Assembler performance. Still, maybe there's hope. Clojure is a relatively new but stable Lisp dialect that ties into the JVM ecosystem and it's gaining adoption. There's also an alpha-stage project to make a Lisp dialect "Hy" that runs as Python and ties into the Python ecosystem: http://gethy.org/. Maybe if pure Lisp can't take the world by storm, one of its children can. I would rather be working in Lisp, Clojure, or Hy than most other programming languages I know.
A kindred spirit - I hate time travel in stories too. I think the only time travel fiction I still genuinely enjoy is the first Back to the Future film. I was pleased that the Star Trek reboot involved a non-repeatable accidental transition into an alternate universe, so that it allows a rehash of the setting without opening the door for all of the typical time travel nonsense.
I think it's too tempting to consider Tolkien cliché because we've all encountered a hundred knockoffs. I also think it's tempting to downplay his contribution because he's well known by non-fantasy fans while many other good fantasy writers are overlooked. I would consider him good, but not among the best.
I have nothing against, McCaffrey and Eddings as brain candy, I just don't consider it a great loss if I fail to get my wife and kids interested in them. If none of my children ever read anything by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, or Vance - that's a tragedy. (Okay, not really a tragedy, but a sad gap in their education in literature.)
I don't mean to launch a flame war, but in my only somewhat humble opinion Zelazny, Saberhagen, and especially Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Vance are in a class well ahead of McCaffrey, Eddings, Jordan, and Asprin.
I think mainstream science fiction and fantasy, just like mainstream fiction, horror, and romance, isn't that good. I read more as a teenager than I do now, and part of that is due to a busier schedule but much is due to the fact that my tastes became more refined. It's no big loss if you refuse to spend $9 on the most recent Laurell Hamilton book.
I apologize for my errors. I had forgotten that you can work around the "private" access modifier in C++ with casts and in Java by using the Reflection APIs.
I should have clarified that your Lisp program will crash on calling a method on an inappropriate input only if you do not handle the error - no different than failing to check for exceptions in C++ or Java. My point was that the error happens at runtime, not a separate compilation step before running the program.
I'm a Lisp newbie, still trying to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
Yes, reflection lets you get around private/protected/default visibility in Java. But it's a bit more work than in Lisp, when you can muck with the innards of whatever it is you're using directly.
Slashdot Mirror
The Barnes & Noble locations around Philadelphia have the full Starbucks logo and the full suite of Starbucks products, but there's an easy way to tell it's not a "real" Starbucks. At all of the real Starbucks locations I've visited in the Philadelphia suburbs, the service is fast. Most Barnes & Noble Starbucks shops I've visited have service speeds ranging from slow to painfully slow.
You run your own shop? I see dozens of little computer shops all over, and I wonder how they stay open. I imagine most people smart enough to avoid Best Buy for PC purchases, parts, and tech support would also be smart enough to put everything together on their own.
Do you make a good business out of it, or is it a struggle to make ends meet?
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has made the same suggestion - that big stores switch from being the place where people buy product into showrooms where people examine product, and then have the freedom to buy it right there or go home and order it. If Best Buy, Sears, etc... did that, and maybe added a Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks Kiosk, maybe some of their locations could be profitable for years to come.
But I don't think that's enough to support their entire business model. I don't think Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, Sony, Maytag, etc... all combined would rent enough floor space in Best Buy locations across the country for Best Buy to keep more than a small percentage of its current stores open.
Good point. I've only worked in salaried positions, but three of the four non-cost-of-living raises I've gotten in my twelve year career came because I presented my current employer with a job offer I received from another company. And the only one that wasn't a cost-of-living raise was also the lowest raise I'd ever gotten.
On the other hand, at least around me all of the best paying positions are in financial firms, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, and research to improve targeted advertising. I'm not yet willing to give up my below-average current salary at a company that provides a useful public service (medical research that is not related to selling a drug) in order to work for especially soulless corporations.
It can be done. Your password is hashed once into some random bit of strings and data, and that is used to encrypt your content. Then that hash and your password are concatenated together and hashed again, and that is sent to Google to authenticate you. Google gets a unique secure token to identify you, which nobody can know unless they have your password. But Google doesn't get the original password, so they can't decrypt your data.
A few services supposedly work this way already, like https://spideroak.com/ backup. Supposedly SpiderOak can't read your data at all - but since only most of their source code is open, you have to trust that they're telling the truth. For all we know, it's an NSA front.
Google can end-to-end encrypt Drive and Docs, they can't do that with email, social networking they host, and searches. For email, anything you send or receive goes out in plain text unless you and the recipient use PGP, and they need to read your mail to do spam filtering. For social networking, as long as they host it they need to hold the encryption and decryption keys for when you share with other users. And their search technology works off of plain text communication, I believe (and could be wildly wrong) that it's possible to have an encrypted search engine with encrypted keyword search, but I believe in that case the end user has to encrypt the data before uploading it to the hosting provider. Since Google collects the data to encrypt, not the end users, that won't work.
I want the internet to work the way you're describing, but I don't see it happening soon. Here's hoping that http://yacy.net/en/ (distributed search engine) and http://secushare.org/ (what looks to me like the best hope for true distributed social networking, but it's in its infancy) take off.
You've got half, more or less, of the howto finished. Continuous learning and self improvement is critical.
But the other half is convincing potential employers that you're worth two or three times as much as they pay their average developers (or devops). How do you manage that? Being damn good is only step one, step two is making other people aware of your competence. I'm working on the first, and I think I'm making acceptable progress. The second... that's harder.
Me, I want to telecommute full time making maybe $100k, maybe $130k, somewhere in that range or better. But at my current job we just payed a contractor for some damn good work for $800 per month, and he's based inside the US. It's hard to justify a good paying remote job when someone surprisingly good is willing to work for almost nothing remotely.
What else are they supposed to do?
I'm not saying it's good that Google and Facebook (and Comcast, and Mastercard, and Verizon, and Sprint, and Bank of America...) turn over data to the government. But I don't think they have a choice.
The best way to protect against having your data harvested is not to let any of those companies hold it. But that's not an easy thing to do.
Vegetarianism is not consistently correlated with a lower obesity level - high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, cane sugar, white flour, and agave nectar are vegan foods. Honey is a vegetarian food. French fries are vegetarian, and can be vegan depending upon what you use to fry them (most fast food restaurants mix some animal fat in their fryers). Cake is vegetarian. Donuts are vegetarian. Hash browns are vegetarian. Soda, apple juice, grapefruit juice, Budweiser, Miller Genuine Draft, Heineken, and Guinness are all vegetarian. Frappuccinos and Milkshakes and triple espresso caramel lattes with whipped cream are vegetarian.
Most studies establishing the health of vegetarianism use the Seventh Day Adventists, who live relatively ascetic lifestyles and don't eat meat but also don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, don't consume caffeinated beverages. Who can say whether avoiding steak does more for their longevity than avoiding Dunkin Donuts?
Aside from eggs and soy flour, most vegetarian foods with high amounts of protein have a lot of carbohydrates or fats along with the protein. You need to eat 600 calories of almonds to get 22 grams of protein. You need an entire pound of vegetarian chili, most legumes, quinoa, or TVP (textured vegetable protein) to get 20-25 grams of protein. That makes it a reasonable task to hit your 50 gram daily recommended allowance from the US government, but 90+% of the fitness guides on the net recommend 1 gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass or more. Some recommend dramatically more. That's hard to hit as a vegetarian and incredibly difficult for vegans.
I think the ability to learn on your own is itself a skill - and an essential one if you want to be good. Get SQL Server Express. Install it. Then use the official web documentation or a highly rated book on it. Start at page 1 and walk through the features. When it gets to a section on setting up foreign keys, use your SQL Server Express to set up foreign keys. When it describes backups, set up backups.
However, this is only half the work required. If he can't point to work experience with SQL Server, then a lot of potential employers don't care what he claims to know from self-study.
Don't get me started. :) We can't tax the wealthy, that would be unfair. We can't raise minimum wages or strengthen unions, that would hurt the economy. Pay not attention to the GDP and corporate profits, if we dared to share even a tiny percentage of them with the proletariat, the world would end.
AMD would do EXACTLY the same thing if the roles were reversed. No-one is innocent here..
And as soon as AMD started abusing a position of power, I would switch to buying Intel or products from some other competing vendor. Until that time, I'm going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt.
Intel could only afford to do that due to their market dominance, and their market dominance comes from the anti-competitive tricks they pulled (see http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3825865&cid=43916359 ).
I'll check out the books, thank you. I have read some of Paul Graham's blog posts before.
:)
I think a point which you allude to is that most developers aren't willing to travel very far outside their comfort zone to learn something new. I believe James Gosling (the father of Java) said something to the effect that they were trying to pull C++ developers towards Common Lisp, and Java was as far as they could safely go.
Clojure has the practical advantage that it plugs into the JVM ecosystem. That's good for using existing libraries, but it's great for getting Java developers who wouldn't look at Common Lisp to give Clojure a try. Most of the tools in their arsenal (IDEs, Maven, Java Servlet Containers, etc...) are still relevant, so instead of learning a new ecosystem and a new syntax it's just some new syntax. But also, Clojure has immutability by default which you can work around as-needed - which I think is a good default to adapt, and seems to be a nice compromise between Scheme (which if I remember right has immutability everywhere) and Lisp. This could be the thing that pulls enough people into Lisp territory that many developers might get comfortable with Clojure and then decide the next step is Common Lisp. At least that's my hope for me.
I also don't think Clojure is "several orders of magnitude slower". If you look at benchmarks between a warm Java Virtual Machine (i.e. one that has executed a program long enough for the just-in-time compilation and optimization to kick in), it often uses dramatically more memory than an equivalent C++ program but generally executes within 2x of the time. ( e.g. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/java.php ) Clojure isn't too far behind Java for performance, so I suspect against most equivalent Lisp applications Clojure is well within one order of magnitude for performance. Since that's nicely ahead of PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl, and those four seem to dominate the internet, I'd say Clojure's performance is adequate.
Thanks for responding to me.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look at Joy.
:) I got started writing software in college in the late 1990s, so the Object Oriented Programming Language craze was in full swing, and I got carried along with it.
My understanding of the benefit of closures - which could be wrong - is that you capture the state of the program at a given point for use later. If that's the main benefit, then immutable objects give you the same benefit with code that's much easier to understand. Is there something else I'm missing?
I realize that the functional features I mentioned are not unique to functional languages. But I think making something idiomatic really is a big help. Maybe I just haven't been around long enough.
Functional programming may be getting more hype than it deserves, but it may not. Most functional programming languages have some aspect of the following three very useful features:
1. A focus on using immutable data objects. In functional languages most functions don't change their input objects, they construct a new output. That lets you reason more easily about your program - if x is 5 in the current scope, it's staying 5, period, and you don't have to worry that you're using it after some other part of your program changed it to 42.
2. A focus on functions with referential transparency - the outputs depend upon the inputs, period, and global state is irrelevant. This makes reasoning about functions, testing functions, and especially re-using functions simpler.
3. Simple syntax for working with higher order functions, lambda functions, partially applied functions, and function currying. You can pass around a function pointer in C or use java.lang.reflect.Methods in Java or anonymous classes, but it's a much heavier syntax for accomplishing some of the same things and the logic of what you are trying to do with the code gets obscured by noisy syntax.
I'm not sure if this means most of us will be using Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/F#/Scala/Clojure in ten years, but I do think some of the swing in this direction is valid, even if it just teaches run of the mill Java, C#, Perl, Python, PHP, etc... developers to use immutable data structures and referentially transparent functions more often.
In general, advanced mathematical topics require you to grapple with abstract concepts and find connections between them, and link them together in ways to accomplish tasks. Any interesting software development (i.e, work that is not "change the color of the login button and move it 7 pixels left") uses the exact same kind of abstract thinking.
So even if you never do multi-variable calculus or ring theory proofs or topology exercises at your job, any time you spend learning those things hones skills you will use at your job.
Interesting. I had to read the wikipedia page on generic functions, because coming from a Java background I first interpreted "generic function" to mean "function that takes inputs that have parameterized types". That's nothing special, and clearly not what you mean.
I guess the interesting but sad question is why Lisp hasn't become the dominant programming language for any application that doesn't require C or Assembler performance. Still, maybe there's hope. Clojure is a relatively new but stable Lisp dialect that ties into the JVM ecosystem and it's gaining adoption. There's also an alpha-stage project to make a Lisp dialect "Hy" that runs as Python and ties into the Python ecosystem: http://gethy.org/. Maybe if pure Lisp can't take the world by storm, one of its children can. I would rather be working in Lisp, Clojure, or Hy than most other programming languages I know.
A kindred spirit - I hate time travel in stories too. I think the only time travel fiction I still genuinely enjoy is the first Back to the Future film. I was pleased that the Star Trek reboot involved a non-repeatable accidental transition into an alternate universe, so that it allows a rehash of the setting without opening the door for all of the typical time travel nonsense.
I think it's too tempting to consider Tolkien cliché because we've all encountered a hundred knockoffs. I also think it's tempting to downplay his contribution because he's well known by non-fantasy fans while many other good fantasy writers are overlooked. I would consider him good, but not among the best.
I have nothing against, McCaffrey and Eddings as brain candy, I just don't consider it a great loss if I fail to get my wife and kids interested in them. If none of my children ever read anything by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, or Vance - that's a tragedy. (Okay, not really a tragedy, but a sad gap in their education in literature.)
Seconded.
I don't mean to launch a flame war, but in my only somewhat humble opinion Zelazny, Saberhagen, and especially Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Vance are in a class well ahead of McCaffrey, Eddings, Jordan, and Asprin.
I think mainstream science fiction and fantasy, just like mainstream fiction, horror, and romance, isn't that good. I read more as a teenager than I do now, and part of that is due to a busier schedule but much is due to the fact that my tastes became more refined. It's no big loss if you refuse to spend $9 on the most recent Laurell Hamilton book.
Thank you for the information.
I apologize for my errors. I had forgotten that you can work around the "private" access modifier in C++ with casts and in Java by using the Reflection APIs.
I should have clarified that your Lisp program will crash on calling a method on an inappropriate input only if you do not handle the error - no different than failing to check for exceptions in C++ or Java. My point was that the error happens at runtime, not a separate compilation step before running the program.
I'm a Lisp newbie, still trying to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
I wrote poorly, I did know that Lisp has error-trapping. I meant in the case when an error is not trapped.
Yes, reflection lets you get around private/protected/default visibility in Java. But it's a bit more work than in Lisp, when you can muck with the innards of whatever it is you're using directly.