How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)

This is maybe more obvious in hardware design.

At the top of the tree you have people like Maxwell, Heaviside, and Shannon, who invent entirely new possibilities out of pure math.

At the other extreme you have technicians who don't truly understand math or theory, but can build a circuit that will probably work if handed a cookbook.

In the middle are people who can work with abstractions like DSP and filter design as long as the ground has been broken for them. They understand enough math to find their own way through a problem from first principles, but aren't creative enough to invent anything truly original.

CS is more amorphous, the levels are maybe harder to separate, and it's cursed by not having a truly consistent practical mathematical foundation analogous to the applied physics that underlies engineering of all kinds.

But IMO there are similar skill levels - although at the higher levels, abstraction can become a bad thing rather than a good one.

The problem is that although there's math in CS, after Church/Turing - which is pretty elementary compared to most physics - there isn't anything that passes for a formal theory of problem/solution specification and computation.

Without that objective basis, a lot of CS is academic opinion instantiated in a compiler. And a lot practical commercial CS is a mountain of hacks built on language and tooling traditions with no empirical foundation.

Commercially, the most productive people will be middle-rankers - not so clever they'll be thinking of new applications for category theory in an iPhone app, but clever enough to be able to think beyond cookbook development.

At ILC 2002 former Lisp giant now Python advocate Peter Norvig was for some reason allowed to give the keynote address like Martin Luther leading Easter Sunday mass at the Vatican and pitching Protestantism because in his talk Peter bravely repeated his claim that Python is a Lisp.

When he finished Peter took questions and to my surprise called first on the rumpled old guy who had wandered in just before the talk began and eased himself into a chair just across the aisle from me and a few rows up.

This guy had wild white hair and a scraggly white beard and looked hopelessly lost as if he had gotten separated from the tour group and wandered in mostly to rest his feet and just a little to see what we were all up to. My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be?

"Yes, John?" Peter said.

I won't pretend to remember Lisp inventor John McCarthy's exact words which is odd because there were only about ten but he simply asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data.

"No, John, it can't," said Peter and nothing more, graciously assenting to the professor's critique, and McCarthy said no more though Peter waited a moment to see if he would and in the silence a thousand words were said.

0: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/ooh-ooh-my-turn-wh...

Is doing front end not actual software development? What does that even mean?

Are you considered a real software engineer if you can write code in a certain language? .. Or does it mean you are really good at O(1) problems?

I think we should all agree that software development is a team effort, it requires vast knowledge and skills that different individuals bring to the table.

Doing CSS adds just as much value as writing the backend API.

Here is a good analogy. For an aircraft to function, pilots, aircraft mechanists, aerospace engineers all come together. Does that mean one is doing "plumbing"?

Certainly not, they all add value.