Just stumbled across this old piece "Beating The Averages" (2003) by Paul Graham again, describing how using Lisp for his start-up company gave them a competitive edge over companies using more conventional languages. Not sure I agree with him, but it's a thought-provoking read - especially for you Clojure pioneers perhaps!
chris webster wrote:Just stumbled across this old piece "Beating The Averages" (2003) by Paul Graham again, describing how using Lisp for his start-up company gave them a competitive edge over companies using more conventional languages. Not sure I agree with him, but it's a thought-provoking read - especially for you Clojure pioneers perhaps!
Nice one. Basically, I also do not know whether I will agree with him completely or not but surely I would say that more than using an unconventional language they used the language that they knew. So, if you want to gain advantage it is important to start early without wasting your time in learning things that may actually consume your energy when you already know another thing to get the work done.
I can see why Graham credits Lisp with his competitive advantage. True, he and his team knew Lisp before they started, but a lot of what made it possible for his team to pivot so fast on changing requirements, and to build such a fast-evolving system, is down to Lisp's expressiveness, abstractions and the inherent ability to extend the language within itself. If you know Lisp (or Clojure) just as well as you know "Language X", I believe you will generally be much more productive in Lisp (or Clojure) and it's why folks gravitate to Lisps but don't generally migrate back to other languages (if they have a choice to stay with a Lisp, that is).
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