4 ms·

The problem is there's no easy way to know which things will actually make you more productive and which won't. Will switching to lisp make me more productive o

The problem is there's no easy way to know which things will actually make you more productive and which won't. Will switching to lisp make me more productive or will it just mean I have to re-write 30 libraries from scratch that aren't written in lisp? Will that productivity multiply as I hire more people or will the fact that it's hard to find lisp programmers mean my options to expand will be limited? Does lisp work well on large teams or does the fact that it's typeless and every programmer makes their own DSL macros mean that it's actually harder to share knowledge? Will switching from framework X to framework Y really increase my productivity? Is it a matter of not understanding how Y is so much more efficient to build thing than X or is it just hyperbole/marketing/cult. Switching to different product management software, different game engine, different 3d software, different wiki system, etc etc .. How can I know. If I believed everyone I'd be switching every week.

darkerside 8y ago
For Lisp in particular, you're probably right about many of the tradeoffs. You won't benefit from a large ecosystem, you won't find as many job candidates (albeit likely a higher quality of average candidate), and it's probably not the best language for large decentralized teams that need to coordinate development (although, what language is?). The lack of knowing you reference is exactly what I'm riffing on here. There are people who have leveraged Lisp features to huge benefit, and there's just no easy way to explain those features to people who don't use Lisp. "There's no way to say it in that language". To outsiders then, Lisp looks like a back-patting cult with no tangible benefits and yet an air of elitism. Similarly, those with "people skills" can't always explain the mental framework and skills they've built up to make themselves excellent at working with other people, but they can easily recognize those skills in another. EDIT: Here's the article. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html The whole thing is well worth the read, but for what I'm talking about here, you could skip down to read about the Blub paradox.

darkerside 8y ago

For Lisp in particular, you're probably right about many of the tradeoffs. You won't benefit from a large ecosystem, you won't find as many job candidates (albeit likely a higher quality of average candidate), and it's probably not the best language for large decentralized teams that need to coordinate development (although, what language is?). The lack of knowing you reference is exactly what I'm riffing on here. There are people who have leveraged Lisp features to huge benefit, and there's just no easy way to explain those features to people who don't use Lisp. "There's no way to say it in that language". To outsiders then, Lisp looks like a back-patting cult with no tangible benefits and yet an air of elitism. Similarly, those with "people skills" can't always explain the mental framework and skills they've built up to make themselves excellent at working with other people, but they can easily recognize those skills in another. EDIT: Here's the article. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html The whole thing is well worth the read, but for what I'm talking about here, you could skip down to read about the Blub paradox.