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Confusing correlation and causation. Clojure coders might be 3x more productive, but they would be in any language. The chance is high that only the top 1% (or
by iSnow 13y ago
Confusing correlation and causation. Clojure coders might be 3x more productive, but they would be in any language. The chance is high that only the top 1% (or something like that) of all coders would dare to make the switch to this language, so you get a biased sample to begin with.
The problem with this of course is that when a company tries to switch their more mundane engineers to Clojure, the project will likely fail.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> Confusing correlation and causation. Clojure coders might be 3x more productive, but they would be in any language. The chance is high that only the top 1% (or something like that) of all coders would dare to make the switch to this language It's too bad that these top coders are so bad at mundane tasks like high-school-level statistics.
- michaelochurch 13y agoI disagree. I think that top-1% programmers actually fare worse when thrown into a typical Java codebase. Sure, they're very productive on their own stuff (whether in Clojure or Java, although I still think those programmers will fare better with Clojure) but if you dropped a 1%er (or even a 10%er) into a pile of someone else's FactoryFactory garbage, he'd either rewrite it or fail completely to make any headway. Bad code is the Waterloo of good engineers. I've seen companies end up in inversion, which means that the most apparently productive engineers are the worst ones. It's a common effect in "design pattern" Java shops with all their Visitor and Factory and Vibrator and AbstractSingletonFactory patterns. It's not pretty. Good people are either taken badly (because they keep agitating for rewrites) or become disengaged and eventually leave or are fired.