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I’m fascinated that some people in our field choose to self describe themselves as “elite”. Are there any programming/computer science greats that self aggrand
by shric 2mo ago
I’m fascinated that some people in our field choose to self describe themselves as “elite”.
Are there any programming/computer science greats that self aggrandize like this? Is it a cultural thing somewhere that I’m not aware of?
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoDescribing oneself as "elite" (or sometimes "l33t") is something people in this field have been doing for a long long time.
- aidenn0 2mo agoAnd people who do so have been a punchline for a long time: https://megatokyo.com/strip/70 https://megatokyo.com/strip/70
- drekipus 2mo agoToo noob to get it
- aidenn0 2mo agoI've been programming in Common Lisp for a quarter century and that list item made me cringe.
- kazinator 2mo agoI'm into Lisp because Lisp languages are easy to work in. I advocate the family as being good for nonprogrammers. Small children should learn some kind of Lisp, and easily can. Richard Stallman famously shared an anecdote in the article "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html) about the secretaries: > The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. People, whether inside or outside of Lisp, who spread myths that that it is some scary, esoteric elite family of languages, have been pretty harmful.
- deterministic 2mo agoGame designers in the games industry use Lua (and other script languages) all the time without being programmers. That doesn't mean that those languages are more "elite" than others. Also, I taught myself machine code programming when I was 11. Just using a book (no help, no internet). So don't underestimate what kids can learn.
- anonzzzies 2mo ago> Also, I taught myself machine code programming when I was 11. Yep, and I didn't know assembly/assemblers were a thing (as they were not in magazines), so I typed and still type (for fun) everything in HEX. data 3E,0A,etc.
- wk_end 2mo agoI think the comment that you're replying to is saying exactly the opposite - a language that anyone including non-programmers can use, if you consider the strict definition of the word, isn't "elite".
- 4xel 2mo agoWholheartedly agree! Even as someone who loves a challenge, has a high opinion of themselves, and knew would love LISP, I postponed diving into it longer than I wish I had, on the mistaken assumption it would be pretty hard. Still, I don't think it's wrong to say LISP is for the elite. It is harmful when it's implied it's only for the elite, but being for the elite is not exclusive with being easy to learn, or being good for newcommers. Heck, lisp minimal syntax is probably what bridges the two, and it (s expression, and lack of m expressions) was explicitly petitioned for by early lispers, for reasons which likely make them a similar elite than present day lisp enjoyers. Likewise, appeal to the masses does not equate ease of learning, or even anti-elitism. It certainly is a common marketing point, but familiarity is what really matters. Emacs has never been so good, Microsoft Office is a good decade or two deep in enshittification, and guess what modern day secretaries use?
- herewulf 2mo ago
- jpcom 2mo agoRoughly just over one-thousand people, precisely 1,337 people self-describe as elite in the field.
- esjeon 2mo agoLisp is a highly expressive language with little constraint, so there’s plenty of room for individuals to become strongly opinionated. That leads to a bit of elite mindset.
- kodoman 2mo agoMost well known Dijkstra, who it can safely be said, is one of the greats. Though this blog post is a little much with the whole elite thing there is a little much, I think a rather terrible attitude that is antithetical to it is that of 'Democratization' which seeks to strip skill and need to learn from building and interacting with technology often at the expense of many positive attributes. It hates any thing that requires skill or simply prior learning to use well despite often these things meaning the system overall can better serve the user better and one the prior work has been done is more effective. Further this 'Democritisation' can be seen as trying to deskill something that taking away many positives and having contempt for skill. I believe This is often simply to devalue software developers and I assume you are one so I believe we should both be cautious of this devaluation. I think a more interesting question would be why should we not have elite's and I don't know if I am unusual but false humility always rubs me the wrong way?
- aidenn0 2mo agoSome thoughts in no particular order: 1. FWIW, the older I get the larger a fraction of EWDs I disagree with. 2. If you take something wrong and reverse it you are usually left with something wrong. 3. Many of the language features that were cited as making lisp "elite" when I was a kid exist in Javascript. Lexical closures were treated like some mysterious thing that you need to study on a mountaintop and become enlightened to get are now used daily by workady front-end programmers. 4. Democratization isn't necessarily about deskilling, it's about making skills accessible to more people. 5. Having and celebrating those who are elite is good. "X is only for elites" is bad. 6. Literally nobody in my 3rd grade class had any issue programming in a dialect of lisp in the computer lab. Certainly some were better than others, but I wouldn't call something that even half the population can do as "for elites only"
- kodoman 1mo agoThank you for your thoughts and I actually agree with you a lot and don't think many of these points actually contradict what I was saying. (I was not defending the notion of the elite status of lisp programmers, but the notion that elites exist can be unsavory (or perfectly pleasant) and should be valued for their skills. Your first point I agree with I think Dijkstra was wrong about a lot of things, but I think that the idea of elegance and looking to mathematics and privileging a mathematical way of thinking in programming language design and perhaps by extension operating system design is something I thinks is valuable and it could simply be said that are disagreement with Dijkstra that we both have are simply born of the corruption of computing that has occurred through unrigorous thinking. It's hard to apply many of Dijkstra's ideas to a program written for a unix or unix like system because these systems from the get go privileged a sort of hacky and pragmatic way of solving computing issues (unix cultures of course having their own elitist culture). On your second point I would concede that Democratization can simply mean opening up the possibility of people gaining skills without gate keeping institutions, My first point is that particularly recently (past 8 years or so) deskilling seems to be meant by it at least partially and as of very recently much more explicitly and maybe even deskill at the expense of giving opportunities to poorer people (think about the ways that AI make it easier for a wealthy person to get their computing done but might do nothing for poorer people how could not afford LLM tokens or local hardware. Finally it's also the case that gatekeeping it's self is a power that most professions have and it's part of their power (think about lawyers or doctors) I don't think this is strictly negative and can also help foster rules of the craft and dedication to the craft and improving it. On the third point, I agree and I think JavaScript is quite explicitly inspired by lisp's and the notion that Lexical closures are some sort of mystical concept that requires deep meditation is silly on the other hand front-end programmers have earned intuition on these concepts and something like a deep meditation on working with react or what ever framework does require constant learning and might be in some way enlightened on how to write good components (as someone who is not a front end developer who has written some front-end javascript for various projects my code can be quite poor and no doubt much poorer then what a professional front end developer would right. On point 5 I largely agree but I think that sometimes something like the kind of elite culture of haskell did produce some good in that it let people work on new ideas and build things that would not otherwise be built starting from pure functional programming would be a hard sell for a mainstream language and using haskell effectively probably does require some ability to grok some bits of theory that many would not (Basic Catagory theory, Abstract Algebra, Thinking more deeply about lambda calculus and purely functional algorithms and the data structures for functional programming). I think this is a good and produces useful things that peculate into other programming languages. The other points I feel are answered with in the points I answered and so will not answer, but reiterate I am not defending the elite status of lisp or lisp dialects I think the article was some what juvenile.
- kazinator 2mo ago"Für Elite" by Letrec Var Bughaven
- dreamcompiler 2mo agohttps://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe. From that perspective it's kind of hard not to be a little condescending toward fans of other languages. It doesn't help that younger programmers today who complain about "too many parentheses" are largely unaware that Lisp was the original language of AI because the guy who invented AI also invented Lisp to help him do AI. I for one am just a tiny bit chuffed about that because I'm certain that more and better progress on LLMs (and beyond) would have happened had Lisp been used instead of Python as the primary vehicle for AI exploration. So yeah, I damn well consider myself elite and I won't apologize for it.
- _jackdk_ 2mo agoI haven't seen a https://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie https://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie in the wild for a very long time. I thought they'd all gone extinct!
- p_l 2mo agoThere's dozens of us! Dozens! /s (and all self-aware)
- bogdanoff_2 2mo ago> Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe. Could it be a form of self-selection bias? That the kind of person that is likely to have such thoughts about a (family of) programming language is also more likely to start and preservere with Lisp?
- brabel 2mo agoThat quote is referring to Lisp’s foundations being essentially a mathematical model that is equivalent to the lambda calculus, which can be shown to be capable of expressing any computation possible. It’s a parallel to the Turing machine, see the Church-Turing Thesis. This makes the language, like mathematics, feel less invented by a human and more like discovered, as if it was some law of the universe.
- chris_armstrong 2mo agoI interpreted this as being a little tongue-in-cheek - reflecting the obscurity of CL and the way the expressiveness of a lisp can make you feel powerful that others will struggle to understand
- stackghost 2mo agoI don't get the impression the author is attributing eliteness to themselves. Wanting to use tools designed by and for "the elite", whomever that is, doesn't mean one necessarily considers themselves to be elite. When it comes to writing software, I don't consider myself elite, but neither do I want to use a language designed by some mid-level engineer. Do you?
- huffhuffhuff 2mo agoElite programmers are people that have excelled at their field for decades. I know I excelled because I have patents, publications, successful products used by millions (if not billions) and a bank account to prove it. Elite coders reading this will just nod, but noobs will make a noise like “huff huff huff” while frantically typing angry responses.
- leoooodias 2mo agoI made a billion successful apps. Each used by trillions.
- dextrous 2mo agoI am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice…
- aag 2mo agoI've known Joe for decades. I've never heard him describe himself this way, but I can confirm that it is true. He is amazing.
- deterministic 2mo agoI know a lot of amazing developers, but they never claim to be “elite” or make similar nonsense claims. They let their work speak for itself.
- aag 2mo agoFirst, read the blog post more carefully. Then read the book Hackers, by Steven Levy. Common Lisp was designed by amazing hackers for amazing hackers. Joe was making a comparison with languages like Java, which has some nice characteristics, but whose designers have repeatedly stated that their goal was pragmatic utility for working developers rather than extreme language power. I'd rather use a language that gives me extreme power, and take the risks.
- deterministic 2mo agoAmazing hackers are everywhere. Not just in the (tiny) Lisp community. Unless you think that the inventors of C, C++, Unix, Linux etc. were not amazing hackers?
- dosisking 2mo agoFreeBSD yes, Linux no
- ragall 2mo agoThis is the Nordic self-effacement which is so ingrained in American culture due to the high number of German and Scandinavian immigrants of the past. Let's just say that not everyone thinks highly of it.
- deterministic 2mo agoIt seems to happen a lot with Lisp enthusiasts for some reason, usually without any evidence to back it up. It always makes me laugh because the real world runs on C/C++, not Lisp. So perhaps by “elite” they mean something other than being successful in the real world? Maybe they think they “get it” while everyone else doesn’t, which somehow makes them “elite”? A bit like conspiracy theorists who think they’re among the few smart enough to know the “truth.” Not sure.
- okamiueru 2mo agoThey do start out by self identify as a "vibe coder". Which is equally embarrassing. What follows is an enumerated list, which I assume they didn't write the contents of, and I don't care to figure out. I had a hiatus from HN for a little while due to these kinds of posts taking over, but the whole front page is just LLM kool aid stuff now.
- boxed 2mo agoIt reads as cringe to me as a Swede where we follow the Law of Jante, but why would Americans think this is cringe?
- ragall 2mo agoJantelagen is also deeply ingrained in American culture due to the large amount of cultural influence from German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants.
- mrkeen 2mo agoLet's look at what TFA actually says: Let’s be honest: Lisp is a language designed by and for elite hackers, not for the masses. What do other people say about other languages? Python is best for novice coders, machine learning, and versatility. [https://www.boot.dev/blog/python/c-sharp-vs-python] Golang: Simpler and minimalistic language with fewer features, making it easier for beginners and experienced developers to learn and use effectively. [https://charleswan111.medium.com/java-vs-golang-a-comparative-insight-into-usage-performance-and-industry-preferences-533a24013230] JavaScript is also considered to be more user-friendly and easier to learn than C++. [https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/blogs/cpp-vs-javascript-programming] If one is allowed to compare apples and oranges, then surely one is allowed to compare oranges and apples.
- TurboHaskal 2mo agoI was really put off by the description of "elite" but if there are indeed languages that claim to be optimized for the experience of newcomers, there are also languages that take the opposite side and optimize for the ergonomics of people who spend a lot of time with it. Perl, C++ and Common Lisp definitely come to mind.
- aidenn0 2mo agoJavaScript has many (most?) of the language features that were cited as making Lisp "for the elite" when I was first learning programming. It also has a few that would have been considered esoteric (prototypal inheritence and async come to mind)
- nineteen999 2mo agoIt's a Lisp programmer thing.
- 0xpgm 2mo agoHey, are people not allowed to self select as smug Lisp weenies anymore? Even on HN? What Lisp enthusiasts lost in terms of actual status in the programming world they make up for themselves in their niche corners and everyone is happy at the end.
- drob518 2mo agoI self-identify as a Smug Lisp Weenie.
- shric 2mo agoOh, they can do whatever they want, I just find it strange. With very few exceptions, people who are “elite” at anything don’t need to blog about their eliteness, their work speaks for itself. Imagine for example Fabrice Bellard (too many amazing accomplishments to list here) posting that he’s an elite developer. That’s right, he doesn’t need to, everyone knows it already.
- drob518 2mo agoAs far as Lisp programmers go, Joe is quite elite, though I suspect he’s got a twinkle in his eye when he says this, applying a bit of sarcasm. He’s been a Lisp programmer longer than most programmers have been alive.