Article discussion “Beating the averages”

The first thing I want to address is the accurate comment about how learning Lisp can compare to learning Latin, and lets not stay in Latin, because as I don’t speak it I can’t back up if it’s true or not, but let’s compare it to something more within reach of comparison for a lot of us, learning another language, let’s say learning English or German, yes, maybe you won’t use it on a daily basis and maybe you won’t even use it at all in some cases, but when you are learning that language you start to develop a deeper understanding of how some things work related to grammar and communication, it gives you, in some sense, a better understanding of your own language and why it is the way you know it. The same thing happens in this case with Lisp as I understand from the writer, when you learn another language and in this case a powerful language like Lisp that is not that related to the ones we are accustomed with, java, c, c++, python your skills as a programmer develop and you begin to understand why that language it’s the way it is and how can you use it with the knowledge you already have instead of marrying yourself to another language like he latter tells us with the example of “The Blub Paradox”.

The other thing I find really interesting is the way he explains us how he began their start up and how he and his partner succeeded with it, during the course of our life a lot of people tells us that the way to be successful is to copy what successful people do, in the case of a company, if they use c++ you should use it too, I mean they use it for some reason right?, if they work with this framework why aren’t you using it? It works for them, it will work for you too, but as he explains most of the time they do this because they already are successful in a sea of competitors, and if you don’t want to drown on that sea you better take an approach somewhat different or better than them because if you try to replicate them, why would anyone care for something “new” that is the same as something else they already know well?. In this case Lisp was the difference that made them succeed  and this shows us really well that trying to imitate the others maybe is not the best approach if you want to be able to be on the top like all those successful companies are.