> Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base Paul Graham's essays are widely known among the HN user base, especially the "Beating the Averages"

> Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base Paul Graham's essays are widely known among the HN user base, especially the "Beating the Averages" [1] one. Some of those who've read it know a bit more about the deeper history. And others obsessed with the "10x programmer" myth and they randomly stumble upon Lisp as one of the many "magic oils" that are rumored to make one into such a mythical creature. It's a big circle jerk imho, but there's a lot to be learned for any programmer from modern Lisp-family languages like Clojure or Scheme/Racket. CL is also worth playing with if you want to know how a truly-hyper-flexible language feels like, but it's probably not a good tool to use unless your problem requires you to invent a new programming language but at the same time you have no time/budget/people to actually do it "the academic way" so you need a weird ducktaped-nuclear-power-tool to hack your way at the problem. Guess that's why some folk in quantum computing and computational chemistry and other on-the-edge-fields tend to pick it from time to time, but it gets replaced with other tech after the really hard research problem gets solved and the software gets rewritten to something else for v2.0. I alway re-try playing with it but it never sticks in my head, the [Python + (C++ or Rust or Go)] combo always wins over it. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html