![]() What we find is that these tools are “talent amplifiers.” If you have the talent necessary to master them, they can definitely make you more productive. The archetypal myth in the programming world is that there is some magic talisman out there, either a programming language, a methodology (whether agile or not), or whatnot, that will give even the most worthless programmer superhuman talent. John, this is well written and I agree with you. In practice, it’s a little more complicated than that, of course. In theory, this takes advantage of the strengths of Lisps and the strengths of standard procedural languages. One of the interesting things about Clojure, Scala, and F# (and perhaps others these are things I’ve played with) is that they take some or all of Lisp’s advantages and marry them to big libraries and run them on the common runtime engines (JVM, CLR). That being said, the really great Lisp programmers I have known personally have also been great at choosing other languages as needed. Lisps, with their simple syntax, code-as-data approach, functional stance, the REPL, and macros, can be incredible intelligence multipliers. One of the hallmarks of a great programmer is that they (get to) choose their tools with care. ![]() Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivityĬould we write a follow-up article, called “The Myth of the Math Genius,” in which you note that Newton, Boole and others were extremely productive in their math capabilities despite the lack of good math symbolism? And, thus, good math symbols are not really necessary?.He may have been able to develop TeX faster using a more powerful language, but perhaps not much faster. I think of Donald Knuth writing TeX in Pascal, and a very conservative least-common-denominator subset of Pascal at that. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. If one does it in 1% of the time of another, it’s probably a matter of talent. If one person does a job in half the time of another, maybe it can be attributed to their choice of programming languages. But I believe talent makes even more of a difference, especially in the extremes. There are reasons why different tasks are commonly done in different kinds of languages. Programming languages do make a difference in productivity for particular tasks. Assuming such a person accurately assesses his productivity relative to his peers, it’s hard to attribute such a vast difference to Lisp (or any other programming language). I’m skeptical when I hear someone say that he was able to program circles around his colleagues and it’s all because he writes Lisp. ![]() More typical programmers might benefit from languages that provide more structure. Lisp imposes almost no structure, and that could be attractive to highly creative people. ![]() It may be that Lisp helps very talented programmers accomplish more. I find the latter more plausible, that exceptional programmers are often attracted to Lisp. In that case, lesser programmers turning to Lisp in hopes of becoming super productive may be engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking. That’s the position taken in The Bipolar Lisp Programmer. Or maybe if Lisp won’t take you from mediocrity to genius level, it will still make you much more productive.Īnother possibility is that super-programmers are attracted to Lisp. One conclusion would be that if you write Lisp, you too will have super-human programming ability. What lessons can we draw from Lisp geniuses? Let’s assume that Lisp geniuses are rare enough to inspire awe but not so rare that we can’t talk about them collectively. Plus he has the hair and beard to fit the wizard archetype. He’s a very strange man, amazingly talented, and a sort of tragic hero. Richard Stallman is a good example of the Lisp genius. I’m thinking myth in the sense of Joseph Campbell, not Mythbusters. Here I’m using “myth” in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I’m not saying that such geniuses don’t exist they do. I’m fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp.
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