
The Myth of the Lone Hacker - Garbage
http://ashtonkemerling.com/2012/11/27/the-myth-of-the-lone-hacker/
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jrajav
Common Lisp isn't the only option. There are other communities that are geared
more towards practical development, with large and growing user and library
bases. Aside from the obvious example of Clojure, I'm thinking specifically of
Racket [1] and Chicken Scheme [2]. I use the latter personally, and it's a
pleasant experience on any project scale, with the heavy emphasis on
extensibility and package management. It also compiles to C.

[1]: <http://racket-lang.org/> [2]: <http://www.call-cc.org/>

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colomon
Lone hackers are not a myth. There are definitely people out there who do
incredible things entirely or mostly by themselves.

It seems to me that question is orthogonal to the value of community for a
language. If anything, a strong language ecosystem empowers lone hackers, and
I suspect most good ecosystems benefit greatly from the contributions of lone
hackers.

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AshtonKemerling
In this case I meant myth in the "tradition or legendary story" sense, not the
"this is completely false" sense.

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zio99
Ashton, I appreciate your thoughts on this subject - I've been meaning to
write about it for a while, and just posted my response here:
<http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36816740387/power>

Not to side-track from programming language semantics, but I hope to engage in
a discussion on the sole entrepreneur as you mentioned.

Edit: I think the bottom line of your post and mine is that: _No one does it
alone_. At least, that's my (perhaps more philosophical than technical) take
on it. So for hackers and entrepreneurs to reach critical mass with their
products/offerings, they need the input/help/support from those around them
(family, friends, clients, etc).

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galois198
I do wonder why such a powerful language such as Lisp has such a small
community and number of libraries. There may exist some trade off between the
level abstraction and number of users for languages. You may have to 'hang
around' long enough before the penny drops and you're a proper Lisper that can
use the language productively. What other languages have for them, in my small
experience at least, is that you can grasp all the essentials and get a
general feel for the language very early on- allowing you to 'hit the ground
running'. With Lisp, it takes a while (I started learning a few months ago) to
grasp concepts such as macros, closures, and continuations, which really give
Lisp its power, and then effectively implement them on the fly. A few bloggers
out there write about the 'moment of clarity' that they get once they
understand Lisp macros, etc.

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gtd
There was an article posted here a while ago that made the case that Lisp is
so powerful that it makes it feasible to do much more yourself rather than
relying on libraries, and thus it attracts a higher level of hacker that wants
to do things their own way and is more intolerant of compromises made in the
name of standardization. Sort of the opposite of the lowest common denominator
approach of successful enterprise languages like Java. The failure to thrive
of Common Lisp is strong evidence of the worse-is-better phenomenon.

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jeremiep
I would say this is also highly driven by non-hackers. Many schools are
nothing more than Java certification shops and many companies select
technologies pushed through salespeople.

I'm fairly sure languages such as Lisp and SmallTalk would be much more
widespread today if the industry wasn't told what to use by clueless people
driven by profits.

~~~
galois198
Interestingly, looking within the Lisp hacker community, individual hackers
seem to be doing quite well. It seems as though the language is geared towards
empowering the individual. Even though Lisp is hard to learn, once you 'get
it' the pay-off seems to be rather large.

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ommunist
Nevertheless, it was Richard Stallman who wrote a hell lot of GNU as a lone
hacker.

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threepipeproblm
So the empowered individual is a myth, and to the extent it is not a myth,
these reckless individuals harm the community. Individualism bad, got it?

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randall
I neither use, nor have used Clojure, but I keep hearing about it, which says
something for the community aspect. Curious how this maps to that.

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porlw
Clojure can draw on the whole Java ecosystem, so it's immediately useful,
which gives it a great entry point.

~~~
jeremyjh
Yes but it also has a package manager and library repository with over 5000
idiomatic Clojure libraries. A lot of projects would not even have to use Java
libraries.

