<story><title>Ron Garret: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career.</title><url>http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-04/msg01644.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>The only thing to take away from this anecdote is that libraries are the key to getting things done these days.&lt;p&gt;When you are writing a compiler, you are doing most of the work on your own.  You don&apos;t need much help from external libraries.  (Perhaps you need a compiler compiler, but that&apos;s about it.)  When you are writing a web app (or something similarly &quot;useful&quot;), you aren&apos;t going to have much time to do your thing if you are reinventing an HTTP server, a request dispatcher, a component loader, an event handling system, a persistence layer, and so on.  The reason the author&apos;s C++, Java, and Python colleagues were getting more done than him is that they were all building things on top of each other&apos;s work.  The author was starting with nothing every time.&lt;p&gt;0 + 1 person&apos;s work is almost always going to be less than (everyone in the company&apos;s work) + 1 person&apos;s work.  If Google used Lisp, he would probably not be &quot;behind&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ron Garret: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career.</title><url>http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-04/msg01644.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mahmud</author><text>Here is his own summary:&lt;p&gt;&quot;The conclusion was inescapable: the problem wasn&apos;t Perl or C++ or Java,
it was me. I just wasn&apos;t a very good programmer any more. Lisp&apos;s power
had made me complacent, and the world had passed me by. Looking back, I
actually don&apos;t think I was ever a very good programmer. I just happened
to have the good fortune to recognize a good thing when I saw it, and
used the resulting leverage to build a successful career. But I credit
much of my success to the people who designed Common Lisp.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Yeah. I can attest to that. Many non-lisper friends have learned to do very difficult things while &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; personally remained ignorant of them because I never needed them. This is analogous to how being a fortune 100 CEO is bad for your health compared to being a day laborer; you no longer sweat and work your muscles, you no longer get the necessary daily vitamin D from sun rays, your hands are not as manly and rugged, etc.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, but then you can afford a chartered JetStream to fly you to the Bahamas for 2 hours of Jungle Gym and back.&lt;p&gt;Ron Garret just wishes 37Signals to fork SBCL and get us Lispers some hype :-P McCLIM windows with rounded corners FTW!</text></comment>