More productive than Lisp? Really??!

Thursday, Mar 10, 2011
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Erann Gat reveals why he lost his mojo with Lisp

What caught my attention (for busy people who don't want to read the whole email):

"So I can't really go into many specifics about what happened at Google because of confidentiality, but the upshot was this: I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found myself suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python."

I'm currently studying Lisp myself and it's hard. Really hard. I blame it on being spoiled with a programming language that I can work in without having to read the manual. With python's brilliant introspection I can use the interpreter to find out how a library works just by using help() and dir() without even having to read the source code. (not always true of course)

As we're entering the 21st century, the new contender "Usability" is becoming more and more important. Considering that I've now done Python for more than a decade I remind myself one of the reasons I liked it so much; yes, exactly that: Usability.

More productive than Lisp? Really??!

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