"Beating the Averages" Analysis
This week’s
article was written by Paul Graham, who is a Lisp programmer and cofounder of
the Viaweb Company (which was sold to Yahoo in the late nineties). The title of
the article is “Beating the Averages”, and as the title says, it has to do with
how Paul and Robert (his friend and cofounder of Viaweb) used Lisp (which Paul
says is a very little known and used language) to successfully get ahead of
their competitors.
When they
had the idea of making their application run on their server, Paul saw that you
could use any language that you wanted, but this was also a problem, because
you also had to choose the one that was better. The advantage that Paul saw in
Lisp is that most people at the time found it weird and hard to use (they still
do now), yet it was a language that allowed them to make developments faster
due to its simplicity while needing less developers (allowing them to cut
costs). This gave him the technological edge among all the startups that may have
been possible competitors for Viaweb. They made developments so fast that
sometimes they would announce their new feature on the press release of the
latest one.
What really
caught my attention was what Paul calls the “Blub Paradox”. Paul states that
when you think on certain language, if you look at less powerful languages you’ll
find them lacking in some way, yet if you look at more powerful languages, you’ll
find them weird and unfriendly. That’s why you need to be on top of the food
chain, so you can really have a true spectrum and understanding of every other
language, and according to Paul, this language is Lisp.
I don’t
know if this is true yet, but I hope to soon find out. Even if I don’t use it
ever (because even Paul says it’s a rarely used language), I’m really excited
to see if it’s as powerful as he says, and I hope it can give me the
perspective Paul has of every other language.
Sources:
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