Social Productivity

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Thu, 05 Oct 2006 03:19:00 GMT

"Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer."

I noticed the same thing at Enfish, where all the Smalltalk programmers (save me) were replaced with C/C++ programmers. I learned C++.

I think one of the reasons dynamic languages are finally gaining some traction is that the problem spaces have gotten so large that you need a team of people even with a powerful language.