Lisp Is Sin

I came across Sriram Krishnan's post 'Lisp is sin.' the other day. One of the elements of this posting is a rebuttal to Joel Spolsky's article 'The Perils of Java Schools.' I have read both articles and would like to throw out my two cents. The major conflict as I see it is, Sriram is making the point that Visual Studio is for all types of programmers from the super genius to the novice to the hobbyist programmer while Joel is for the super genius programmers and criticizing how Java hides the difficult tasks making it hard to tell the great programmers from the bad programmers.

In my current job I like software and programs that are easy to work with and provide a simple easy to use API. This allows me to focus on completing the task at hand increase the likely hood of hanging the program off to someone else to support. When I am at home I enjoy struggling with software and programs. I use these struggles to increase my knowledge. I want to figure out how to make hard tasks easy.

One of my issues with Sriram's posting is how he is cramming the solution to every problem into the C# view of the world. I like learning new programming languages because it changes how I view the world and how I approach problems. I have a fundamental view that there is always more then one way to solve a problem. What I have found is by learning different programming languages I have more ways of solving a problem. My work has a policy what we develop must develop in one specific language. So one day I was fighting with a piece of code written by another developer who left the company last year. I took a step back from the code and said if I was working in language X how would I solve this problem. In one of those light bulb moments the solution to my problem jumped into my head. I was able to fix the code in a few hours instead the three weeks everyone else around me was thinking it would take to rewrite the code.

Now for something slightly different. Dave Roberts' posting 'Commentary on "Lisp is Sin"' brings up some interesting counter points to Sriram's article.