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

As Brian Hayes says in his article “Semicolon wars”, there a re a lot of programming languages and there is not a definitive one. Each programmer will have his/her own favorite language between thousands and thousands of languages. And Brayan says that even though there are a lot of languages, there is not any “definitive language” created yet, and if any company is trying to make the better one, we must cooperate to make so. And I think that it is completely true. We can help giving some feedback about fixes that must have to perform, or by the other way advices of what to change or what to improve or delete.

It’s amazing how many languages in little time were created, and with great differences between some of them, the article gives the example that between C and Lisp, the differences are greater than between any pair of human language. And if you think, the human languages are now pretty difficult, humans have invented thousands of computer languages, and for sure will create more and more, and they are focused on create a definitive one.

About the comments of Edsger W. Dijktra said about different languages, I am against him. He criticizes, in a very offensive way, in his book “How do we tell truths that might hurt”, some languages as COBOL, APL, BASIC and others. We don’t have to discuss if that language is better that others, or this language is trash.  Language were not invented to judge them. We have to work with them to solve problems, and probably improve our devices.

About Lisp, I´m interested on learn and try to solve different kind of problems in that language. Learning a new language will not kill me and maybe at the end of the course I’ll change my main programming language. Who knows?

Reference

Hayes, B. (2006). The semicolon wars. American Scientists

Hi. My name is Marco Isaac Buendía Mejía. I am 21 years old. I'm studying the carrier Computer Systems Engineering at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. I live in Tecámac, but because my house is far from the school, I moved to an apartment. My hobbies are play videogames, watch anime series, play card games and climbing. But the last one, since I had an accident, I decide to leave the activity for a time. My future plan is to find a work in Japan and buy a house there. For that, I'm studying Japanese language.