3 ms·
The article makes an attempt to answer the question in the title (cheap computers forced Eastern European programmers to be really efficient) but I am reminded
by T-A 8y ago
The article makes an attempt to answer the question in the title (cheap computers forced Eastern European programmers to be really efficient) but I am reminded of Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" essay [1]:
> It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something. In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was leaking news of their features to us. We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible.
PG and Robert Morris could do that because they had a "secret weapon" (LISP). The Skype developers had one too [2]:
> Delphi was chosen because our first senior UI developer was very skilled at Delphi (besides dozen other languages-environments) and we saw D as most productive, fastest, efficient way to build our app given our team/lead developer skills and also getting very good UX on MSWin platform.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[2] https://www.quora.com/What-programming-language-was-Skype-originally-written-in?s=1 https://www.quora.com/What-programming-language-was-Skype-or...
- beamatronic 8y agoI wonder why more folks don’t use Lisp, or Smalltalk for that matter, for back end development.
- expertentipp 8y ago> Estonia > Eastern European You just made a little Estonian girl cry.
- T-A 8y agoOr maybe half a century of Soviet occupation made her cry?
- unixhero 8y agoWell Baltic European state, ... is that better?
- T-A 8y agoI am astonished to see that my previous reply to the above (completely off topic) comment has been flagged and downvoted to oblivion. If a country is located further East than Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, former Yugoslavia and former East Germany; shares a long land border with Russia; and was a de facto part of the Soviet Union for the entire duration of the Cold War; then yes, of course it is an Eastern European country. How is stating that obvious fact a violation of any posting rules? If anything, it is the implied denigration of Eastern Europe that should be raising eyebrows.