Name: Anonymous 2009-10-19 7:42
So, I was reading this fine article: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm about Paul Graham's "Programmers and Painters", and encountered the following passage:
Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you.
<..>
It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'.
Then another article immediately sprang into my mind: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
As I look back now I see this attitude -- of Lisp being a special, tragic, too powerful, misunderstood by the masses etc language -- permeating almost every relatively modern (nineties and later) text about Lisp and Lispers.
Is Lisp the programmers' Twilight?
Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you.
<..>
It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'.
Then another article immediately sprang into my mind: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
As I look back now I see this attitude -- of Lisp being a special, tragic, too powerful, misunderstood by the masses etc language -- permeating almost every relatively modern (nineties and later) text about Lisp and Lispers.
Is Lisp the programmers' Twilight?