Beating the Averages

"Beating the Averages" is an article written by Paul Graham, co-funder of Viaweb, which principal purpose is to spread the story of how Lisp was a fundamental factor in the creation of the company because Lisp has many features that other languages didn't have and not everyone knew how to work with it.

Something very curious is that Graham justified his success with LIPS in that "the strengths that made this language a powerful tool for Viaweb was that Lisp is poorly implemented in the industry" and therefore the same is not very popular in the context which causes that its management and its implementation was very unknown for many of the programmers that was dedicated to the development doing that other companies could not copy their strategies and knowledge in their business. Lisp is a difficult language to learn and master and most programmers prefer Oracle, C, C++, Java... Eric Raymond says that "Lisp will make you a better programmer, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot" which is something that make us think that precisely this language is difficult to learn but it has its rewards. As it is a hard language to learn is can teach you another way to develop. Why learn latin if nobody uses it anymore?, well it is the foundation of many other languages and so by learning latin we can jump to other languages easily, the same happens with LISP.

A really nice thing he also does is that instead of crushing other programming languages, he decided to create the "Blub Paradox" which is a fictional programming languages that he uses to explain how programmers think, I mean the programmers only think in the way their programming language allowed them to. Jump to another language is always a true challenge.

As learning of this reading, I think that after watching this case of triumph lead by the use of Lisp is important to give an opportunity to the new tools that are in the market no matter they are not very popular (of course, this applies in specific cases). Like programmers is important that we have a general knowledge about the use of the different options that we have available because we can generate more and different ways of solving a problem because as it is referred in the article: you think in the language you know how to use.

If you're interested in reading this article, here is the link: Beating the Averages.