4 ms·

First of all, thanks for the constructive criticism. This is my first blog article, so I'm begining to realize the sensitivity of carefully wording things. Wi

First of all, thanks for the constructive criticism. This is my first blog article, so I'm begining to realize the sensitivity of carefully wording things. With regards to my constraint "(and I mean really program)", I merely wanted to exclude those people who claim to "know about" LISP, or who are not competent in LISP (and I think I have a weaker threshold for competent than you). I guess I tend to disagree with your statement: "Similarly, a competent programmer is likely to be versed in several languages, and likely they will fall into different paradigms." I think "a competent programmer" is a low bar (70 percential?). I don't think it's true that competent programmers are likely to be "competent" in several languages that fall into different paradigms. Also, I feel like LISP's paradigm is so far removed from most others (and with arguably a superset of concepts), that any programmer who is competent in LISP IS likely to be competent is several other languages that span different paradigms. Agreed if there exists one programmer out there who ONLY knows LISP, they lack the complete conceptual understanding I'm asserting. It seems to me that programmers who tend to write spaghetti code and/or over complicate matters will abandon LISP out of fustration before they achieve "competency in LISP". The point of the article was to assert that "competency in LISP" implies much more than "competency in LISP" and that this statement is not true of most other programming languages. Sorry you feel this article propagated misconceptions, I'll try to do better next time.

whacked_new 19y ago
Apologies if I came off as too aggressive. I guess you can say that the title -- which at face value made a fairly daring statement -- primed my critical attitude, like many bloggers had to pg's "MS is Dead" article. I may very well have overreacted, so don't take my words too seriously. Clearly you didn't write the article to start flamewars; I could just be an instigator who tries to sound coherent. Great to hear feedback though, and you found a weakness in my argument. My preconceptions of a "competent programmer" are often based on qualities I wish I had :)

whacked_new 19y ago

Apologies if I came off as too aggressive. I guess you can say that the title -- which at face value made a fairly daring statement -- primed my critical attitude, like many bloggers had to pg's "MS is Dead" article. I may very well have overreacted, so don't take my words too seriously. Clearly you didn't write the article to start flamewars; I could just be an instigator who tries to sound coherent. Great to hear feedback though, and you found a weakness in my argument. My preconceptions of a "competent programmer" are often based on qualities I wish I had :)