Revenge of the nerds

The author in this article explained the definition of a pointy-haired boss, which is the boos that will ask you to develop a program or a system, he will not be able to determine how will it work or in which language should be code it, but he will assume the best choice is Java, this is because he should have heard Java is a stand so for him this will be the best tool to use.

We know that not all the programming languages are the same, but I really think that this assumption may be correct in the way that you can solve almost every problem with Java implementation, but this doesn't mean that the best choice for an specific problem should have been Java, maybe another language like C++ or Python could have been a better solution.

Considering what the author said, “The disadvantage of believing that all programming languages are equivalent is that it's not true. But the advantage is that it makes your life a lot simpler”, we can establish that every solution can be solve with any language but in my pinion this makes you a lazy programmer because you did not try to understand the complexity of the problem so you didn't have to choose the proper language.

Having spoked about this issue, the author introduced Lisp as a theoretical exercise more than a programming language. Lisp was more like mathematical theories, and he states that Math will never be obsolete thus Lisp will be neither.

Then he defines a list of the qualities which make Lisp unique, like its conditionals, recursion, garbage cleaner, etc.

Despite this, the author still argue about some few disadvantages such as not having programmers that know this language, or bad implementation of other platforms and having very few libraries and frameworks.

I agree with these statements because i consider that nowadays there should be a lot of communication between platforms and sometime the existence of an already made library or framework sometimes save us a lot of time and money.

At the end he puts some example in order to compare the Lisp syntax with the one for SmallTalk.

References:

  • Revenge of the nerds (May 2002), available at: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

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