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You misunderstood me. Of course there's plenty of good web developers. It's just that, in my opinion, the average programming language is less elegant than Lisp

You misunderstood me. Of course there's plenty of good web developers. It's just that, in my opinion, the average programming language is less elegant than Lisp, and the average programmer is less passionate than the average Lisper. This says nothing about individual programmers - there's just a lot of web developers (that's why I picked PHP as an example, because in my mind it's the standard example of a "mainstream language"), and many of them aren't particularly passionate about programming, it's just a job to them (which is, as I tried to point out, perfectly OK!). People who know Lisp, on the other hand, are almost exclusively passionate about programming, because there's no real reason to learn Lisp if you're not - it's not known to be particularly employable. I never tried to make a value judgement of web developers as a group, it was just a matter of statistics. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.

armitron 10y ago
Your argument has merit, disregard the dissenters, just noise. The same is true for other great languages. In my view, Erlang, FORTH, Smalltalk. I've yet to meet anyone well-versed in these that didn't turn out to be a good programmer. Moreover, this process is additive. I've met a few people over the years who are well-versed in subsets of the languages I mentioned, that turned out to be masters of the craft and helped me improve tremendously either through them commenting on my work, or me examining their output and their problem-solving approach. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be Artists. In close to 20 years in this domain, I've yet to meet a single person whose primary expertise lies in {C, C++, Javascript, PHP, Java, C#, Python, Ruby}, that has triggered paradigm shifts in me that led to personal growth or re-evaluating programming. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be laborers. Of course the second group is also far larger than the first, and includes all the hacks [1], primadonnas [2] and mediocrats [3] one would expect. [1] http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-managing-director-technology http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-mana... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum

armitron 10y ago

Your argument has merit, disregard the dissenters, just noise. The same is true for other great languages. In my view, Erlang, FORTH, Smalltalk. I've yet to meet anyone well-versed in these that didn't turn out to be a good programmer. Moreover, this process is additive. I've met a few people over the years who are well-versed in subsets of the languages I mentioned, that turned out to be masters of the craft and helped me improve tremendously either through them commenting on my work, or me examining their output and their problem-solving approach. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be Artists. In close to 20 years in this domain, I've yet to meet a single person whose primary expertise lies in {C, C++, Javascript, PHP, Java, C#, Python, Ruby}, that has triggered paradigm shifts in me that led to personal growth or re-evaluating programming. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be laborers. Of course the second group is also far larger than the first, and includes all the hacks [1], primadonnas [2] and mediocrats [3] one would expect. [1] http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-managing-director-technology http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-mana... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum