Friday, January 04, 2008

Beating the averages, a second look

A friend of mine sent me a link to the article ”Beating the Averages”, which I read in 2001. I read it again today, and best I can tell, I have come up with the same answer I had back then. That is, the most important statement in the whole article, while it has a lot of good and important things to say throughout, is this line which starts the eleventh paragraph:

Robert and I both knew Lisp well

You have to use a programming language your programmers know and know well. If your programmers know more than one language, then, sure, you get other choices. However, this leads me to my second point which is that once you are ready to outgrow your initial programmers - be that attrition, death, growth, or one of any other number of reasons, you have to be able to get more programmers.

LISP is a fantastic language. I would argue that it was and is ahead of the rest for many of the same reasons the author talked about in 2001. I supported the Artificial Intelligence group at Boeing for about 6-8 months. They programmed in Lisp. It was quite impressive. And, they learned those languages in thos fancy academic institutions they got their degrees from - Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Cal Tech, etc.

FYI, LISP was developed in the late 50’s at MIT.

People who know LISP, in my mind, are real programmers. People who know LISP probably know a half dozen other languages too. These type of people are the programmers who really understand and are examples of the phrase, “Use the right tool for the job”. I am not saying that you can’t be a “real programmer” without knowing LISP. Please do not fall into this or any other fallacy.

Fortunately for me, I do not work for a startup looking to find a competitive advantage to have the chance of staying alive. Unfortunately for me I work in an area that has few people who have graduated from programs that even have heard of LISP or for that matter anything beyond VB, , C Sharp, and MAYBE Perl or PHP. I would be more likely to find around here where “html” is considered a programming language. (Go Michigan!) (Okay, to give them a little break, that page is from 1996, but it is still up, so I can’t give them too much of a break.) Or, you go here, and find that it is listed in the drop-down as an option under “programming languages” and is listed in the text as well.

Overall, the article is a good article. However, my job as a technologist, and especially as a technology manager, is to read such articles and then to see the reality in them. I would encourage others to do the same (starting with this one).