Beating the averages

Beating the average is an article of a conference made on 2001 at Franz Developer Symposium, and is about the experiences of the programming language Lisp, when two programmers made a software that let the users build online stores. They called Viaweb.

 Is very interesting how the author speaks about Lisp as an excellent language to learn. When he is talking about his experience when he launched his startup, he explains that his company was the better in that moment, and there were about 30. Why? Because they used Lisp, a programming language that was used only for scientific research, so it was a strong weapon that nobody thought they were using. I learn with that, that is very important the time the projects take to deliver. The faster the cheaper. And with that, the author´s company was the leader at its moment. And he says that the speed of develop is very important when you are competing with others. An important advice if you want to start your own company. Although, when you are starting with a new company, you don’t need to copy what the other companies (in special de big ones) do. You need to find specific things that makes your company better than the others. And when the company is big enough, you can now copy the other ones. And at this moment, it is an estimate of growth of about ten percent by year.

To conclude, I think that the information given in this article is very important to take note for the future. Also as the author explains how Lisp is a great programming language, it makes me see this language with other eyes. But for now, as I´m learning how to program in Lisp and how is it, I´ll keep programming in Java.

Source

Graham, P. (April 2001). Beating the averages. Obtained in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html