4 ms·

I'm referring to the tales of orders-of-magnitude flexibility and productivity enhancement, mostly the "Beating the Averages" essay, in other words. Here's a fr

I'm referring to the tales of orders-of-magnitude flexibility and productivity enhancement, mostly the "Beating the Averages" essay, in other words. Here's a fragment that seems to promise almost magical productivity: 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 19y ago
That's out of left field? We were writing code in Lisp, with a read-eval-print loop to test stuff, and they were writing code in C++ with "builds." There's nothing preposterous in claiming we could implement a serious feature in a couple hours. A lot of people could today with Ruby or Python. But there were no Ruby or Python at the time I'm describing. (An early form of Python existed, but few used it.)