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A comment on How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006). Parent comment

Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by wolfgke on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @08:24AM (#16584226)
> Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN.

Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris, two of the founders of YCombinator, love Lisp/Scheme. They got rich by selling their company Viaweb to Yahoo. You guessed it: Viaweb was written in LISP and Paul Graham believes that this was their secret weapon:

> http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Also the software that drives Hacker News is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect that was invented by Paul Graham.

So Hacker News and YCombinator are indeed at least historically very attached to Lisp/Scheme.

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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by mattmanser on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:37AM (#16585019)
Which promptly got rewritten after pg left.

EDIT: From the years being here, and having played with LISP myself, it's a language that appeals to a certain type of programmer, who claim to find it very productive compared to other languages.

And everyone else hates it.

So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.

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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by flavio81 on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @02:11PM (#16586937)
>So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.

I'd rather have 5 very good Lisp programmers than 50 code monkeys.

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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by mbrodersen on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:45PM (#16598461)
I'd rather have 5 very good programmers (using ANY language) than 50 code monkeys (using ANY language). The problem with the Lisp programmers is that they very likely would not be able to work as a team.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by lispm on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:34AM (#16599182)
I think this claim has no base. I've worked with Lisp programmers and there was no special problem doing so.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by vzcx on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @06:24PM (#16588877)
I might even prefer 5 average lisp programmers to 50 code monkeys.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by kamaal on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @12:37PM (#16585978)
The whole point of picking Lisp as a language for many people is to have a hiring pool of small but good programmers.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by hbk on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:15AM (#16584867)
Also Y Combinator is a technique to do recursion on lambda calculus which lisp is built upon.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by mbrodersen on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:46PM (#16598466)
Haskell (and other functional languages) is also built on the lambda calculus. Lisp isn't special in that regard.
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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by mbrodersen on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:44PM (#16598456)
So what? 10000+ companies were successful with software not written in Lisp. Biz success is not decided by the programming language you use.
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