Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
rondam.blogspot.com
Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
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Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#2"A team of competent programmers willing to put up bullshit will out-compete a lone wolf striving for elegance no matter how brilliant he is."
I'm doomed.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#3A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it.
Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone?
Lisp, like any sufficiently useful language, simply gives you enough rope. It's good, sturdy, and well-tested rope. You could probably climb a mountain with it. Or hang yourself. Your pick. The rope has very little to do with it.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#4A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…
If there is one feature in lisp that might fit that category it would be macros. They are great for single programmer productivity while I have seen people who worked in large teams complain about lisp macros. However like every other feature macros could be minimized by the companies coding style handbook.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#5A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…
I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team players go off and use C/Perl/Ruby/Python/whatever because those communities are full of other team players. As a result, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and the team players win, even though as individuals they may be generally less productive/smart/whatever.
On those rare occasions when Lisp programmers manage to all row together in the same direction they can produce some truly spectacular results (Viaweb, ITA, RAX). But those seem to be the exceptions.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#6This response was much more substantial than the original article.
To say that the original article was "about" Lisp, or the Lisp Genius, would be akin to my saying that there are fleas "about" my dog.
BTW: I wonder if Rondam(?) knows this guy: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#7This response was much more substantial than the original article. To say that the original article was "about" Lisp, or the Lisp Genius, would be akin to my saying that there are fleas "about" my dog. BTW: I wonder if Rondam(?) knows this guy: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Same person. He changed his name a while back.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#8A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…
I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…
Which is why I have high hopes for Racket and Clojure - less NIH syndrome, more libraries, friendlier communities, and a healthy respect for good ideas from a wide variety of programming languages, not just Lisp.
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#9Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim:
There are genius programmers who write Lisp,
and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks
would also be able to accomplish amazing things in
other languages.
Extraordinary developers do extraordinary things, regardless of the tools used. Here's an example, using as reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history
The development of Git began on April 3, 2005. The project was announced on April 6, and became self-hosting as of April 7. The first merge of multiple branches was done on April 18. Torvalds achieved his performance goals; on April 29, the nascent Git was benchmarked recording patches to the Linux kernel tree at the rate of 6.7 per second.
And here's the kicker: Linus would probably be more productive in LISP, but would he bring more value to the world? Probably not, as churning out code is not Linus' strength -- he outcompetes everyone by superior design, by pragmatism and by being a good team-leader.
That's the type of developer I admire -- people that kick-ass in bringing value and making sacrifices is part of that. Sometimes you have the luxury of picking up a new language (Ruby) and invent a new web framework with it (Rails), sometimes you don't. Either way, code talks bullshit walks (so to speak).
Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"
#10Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim: There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case. Extraordinary deve…
> the author assumes he's one of those geniuses
Exactly the opposite actually. Not only do I not assume that, I specifically deny it.