Arc is a new dialect of Lisp for EXPERT PROGRAMMERS, especially suited for web applications (faster than ruby on rails). Arc is being designed and implemented mainly by Paul Graham. The following resources are currently available:
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Anonymous2007-08-07 21:46 ID:StJXpHLV
Also, I remember reading in one of his essays that he hired people right before Yahoo bought them so they looked like a bigger outfit. So Yahoo probably thought they were buying a development company, but of course the real talent probably left sometime after they became millionares. Clever, maybe, but hardly a sustainable way to do software development.
Of course software development goes better (in any language) if you only have geniuses, but realistically most companies can't depend on having only that type of talent (or rely on development methods that assume that). So having 5 pretty good programmers (of course bad programmers are a mistake) might often be better that having 1 brilliant programer, even if it is much more expensive and the result is not quite as good.
For example, if that brilliant programmer quits you're fucked, you don't have anyone left who knows the codebase and good luck finding someone else as good who wants to work on your boring enterprise product. What if they write code that works well, but is not easy to understand or doesn't have good documentation? What if they use some unpopular language that is very hard to find talent in?
Software doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sure there are many ways that standard practices could improve, but I don't think that "everyone should be as smart as I am" is a real solution.