"Revenge of the Nerds" Analysis

This week we paid another visit to Paul Graham. In his article “Revenge of the Nerds”, he talks about how bad is the knowledge and culture about the diversity of programming languages on the administrative levels of big corporations and how this is detrimental to the development of new software.

Paul starts by defining a fictional character called “Pointy Haired Boss”, which he takes from the Dilbert comic strips.  This character is your everyday boss who knows his ways around administrative stuff but knows little to nothing about the inner workings of the projects he manages. This character becomes particularly problematic because usually he has control over what language is going to be used for a particular application.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how, in my experience, some programming languages are better suited for certain applications. Even Lisp with its all-powerfulness may not be as well fitted for a dedicated embedded system that just does one thing.  That’s why the idea of all programming languages being the same is a real problem when it comes to writing new applications. Because people that are less versed in programming languages will always go with the trendy option.

 As Paul states later on, writing in some languages is very slow compared with how fast you can write it in a more efficient language, sometimes what you can achieve in three months is achieved in five years if it can be achieved at all, and obviously this slows development on all areas of technology.

Also, what I think is great is what Paul says about Lisp being math, not a language. And as such it never becomes obsolete. Maybe this is the correct approach to creating languages, not trying to make it more elaborate (because what I really like about Lisp is its simplicity), but making it more like math.