Re: open source notebook see: http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html I'll make the relation very clear. There

Re: open source notebook see: http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html I'll make the relation very clear. There is a segment of the Lisp community, which most certainly includes Paul Graham, that maintains that projects with large team sizes are bad. There is a certain logic here, as it is hard to maintain a high average intelligence distributed across a large number of people. Most true geniuses were loners. Regardless, projects of a certain scope (i.e. building a space shuttle) require large teams. You simply can't do it with two guys in a basement. In a certain sense the computer language employed is irrelevant, except that the lisp community has never, largely because of the facts that should be obvious but are apparently not to the introverted "genius" types they pray on, produced good and extensive enough libraries to be viable for most real world tasks. In case you didn't notice, for example, it took what, 4 years for Hacker News to get HTTPS support. I don't want to rib anyone too badly, because I am a strong supporter of what YCombinator is doing in general and in the incorporation of lambdas and closures in newer languages, but I think generally speaking it is clear that the Lisp culture is not to cooperate but to position one's self as some sort of genius and thus to create one's own dialect, etc. I'll give you an example that will probably irritate some people, but is relevant here. Microsoft Word is, in my opinion, one of the greatest architectural marvels of modern civilization. The feature set of that single app is truly extraordinary, and there are all sorts of wonky ways that you can do lots of tasks that makes millions (and potentially even billions) of people's lives better every day. I understand that there is a point to OpenOffice and "fighting the man" and whatever since Microsoft certainly crushed some competitors in mean ways, but realistically there is nothing in the world that competes. Now you might say, oh sure but I can just use vim and use latex for formatting (or even google docs). And in a certain sense you might be right too, but sooner or later you will find a feature that is not accessible to you (I recently noticed that change tracking still absolutely blows in Google Docs compared to Word). Why do I bring this up? Well, even if you are right that "the hardest part of going to the Moon is achieving Earth orbit," you still have to have all of those other things. You need life support or you dead; this is non-negotiable, just in the way that mail merge is not negotiable for millions of people at millions of office worldwide. And if you want life support (or mail merge), you need to work with the people who design these other systems. By the way, I'm not saying you need to like any of this. I'm simply saying that if you want to build something great, you have to at times slog through the mud. My experience with Lispers is they are frequently afraid to get their hands dirty. And that doesn't cut it except in a pretty-ditty fantasy castle.