
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer - muriithi
http://www.lambdassociates.org/Blog/bipolar.htm
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phony_identity
I used to attend meetings of a Lisp / FP users' group. Man, what a lineup of
the brilliant unaccomplished. There were maybe one or two guys who were using
Common Lisp at their jobs (one was at Amazon) and getting amazing stuff done
with it. You could spot these guys immediately by their energy and social
comfort. But the rest were always working on something cool and never
finishing it. They were so far gone nodding in their opium parlor of thought
there seemed little hope. I couldn't interest them in any practical project.
They were only interested in the next high.

I used to think 'publish or perish' was a bad thing for academia. Now I don't.
Everyone needs external social pressure.

------
marcus
Story of my life. Started CS in the age of 13 flunked out after 2 years. Been
in & out of universities (mainly CS & philosophy) ever since, attracted to the
ideal, disgusted by reality. All my life I abandoned most projects that took
more than a a few weeks, but did some very cool things in these short time
spans. But I think I found the cure, at least for me, a project that is
superbly compelling... Suddenly my highs were longer and the lows not so low,
and I have been finally been able to apply myself to a single project for a
long time, over a year now. I think you need to find a project that will
captivate you like the Everest captivated Sir Edmund Hilary, a monumental
challenge in a field that interests you. Mine is developing a new machine
learning algorithm.

~~~
jey
" _you need to find a project that will captivate you like the Everest
captivated Sir Edmund Hilary, a monumental challenge in a field that interests
you_ "

Quoted for truth. Plus with a big enough problem, there will always be
neighboring issues you can look at when you get bored of the sub-sub-problem
that you are focusing on at the moment.

------
pg
I don't disagree with his portrayal of the brilliant failure, or even with the
statement that such a person would be attracted to Lisp. But brilliant
successes and brilliant failures both seem to be attracted to it, which
implies that the brilliance is responsible for the attraction, not brilliant
failure specifically.

He's even further off when he says that the reason Lisp isn't more popular is
because of the mysterious quality that attracts such people. It's unpopular
for more mundane reasons: the syntax looks odd, and there's no good, standard
implementation with lots of libraries.

~~~
abstractbill
"...there's no good, standard implementation with lots of libraries."

I think his point was that there's no good, standard implementation with lots
of libraries _because_ many of the people drawn to Lisp have big ideas but are
bad at finishing things.

~~~
pg
The problem is that the main dialects of Lisp (CL and Scheme) date from the
era when languages were specs. Now they're implementations. It just happens
that no one has released a good new Lisp dialect in that sense of language.
But no one (as far as I know) has released a good new Fortran in that sense
either.

Language designers who have what it takes are quite rare: Matz, Guido van
Rossum, Larry Wall. It just happens none of them chose to create a Lisp
dialect. But the problem is not the brilliant failures who are drawn to Lisp,
but that e.g. Matz wasn't (quite).

~~~
brlewis
Are you saying that if someone releases a good new Lisp dialect, then it will
become popular?

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bluishgreen
Comment I posted in reddit when this article turned up a year back.

"And here we are rushing to put in a mee too comment. I have known this about
me for sometime. I had this thing about people. What ever you admit, you admit
it because you are proud of it. Like for eg. I am always busy - yeah, you are
proud of being busy. Or to bring the point out, one of my friends admitted to
me that he suddenly realised that he was arrogant ( a BBM himself ),
subconsciously he is proud of being arrogant.

My simple question: Does it have to be like this ? I mean, being Brilliant and
a failure. C'mon guys, failure sucks. Big time. If you don't feel that, you
don't have a problem. But if you do, consider this. Lets turn this inside
itself in the true spirit of Lisp. Being BBMs we can come up with brilliant
solutions to 'cope up with brilliance' while avoiding failure. Can't we ? Stop
being proud. That's the point where it Starts. Post any coping mechanisms you
have discovered over the years as reply to this thread. Thanx."

------
qaexl
This is a SciAm article about praising kids for intelligence vs. praising for
hard work:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655>

Net result: kids praised for their intelligence tend to look for things that
are easy or to appear smart. Challenges and mistakes often de-motiviate these
kids. "Smart"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude where intelligence is a
fixed, natural attribute and being able to accomplish something easily is a
sign of natural intelligence. "Growth"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude
that intelligence can grow and that challenges and mistakes are opportunities
to learn. These kids tend to relish challenges, often getting even more
excited over difficult problems.

I think that sums up LISP and C with regards to the brilliantly
unaccomplished.

Being able to trivially do something in LISP that is difficult in C is good
... yet for someone who relishes a challenge, what does that mean to find a
really hard problem in LISP that is nearly impossible in C?

------
jey
Does anyone have a link to the thread from the last time this article was
posted on news.yc? I tried a few google searches, but it seems that the link
depth is too far back and it isn't indexed.

~~~
bluishgreen
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012>

(Hack, the only way to search YC at YC I know of: try to google for the old
link and submit it to YC again, and it will detect the duplicate and lead you
to the thread )

~~~
kirubakaran
<http://www.kirubakaran.com/phr0zen/>

(Front page snapshots from Sep 29, 2007. (wouldn't have helped you in this
case))

------
anaphoric
Yes that hits pretty close to home I must say... Here comes the depressive
cycle again, LOL!

------
cstejerean
I feel as if this article was written about me.

~~~
asdflkj
Me too (and everyone else, it seems), but I wonder how much of this is Forer
Effect. If you go through his description point by point, you'll see that each
thing is something that people like to think of themselves, or tend to notice
in themselves, but not in other people.

------
jkush
I never thought that being bipolar meant living through, frenetic herculean
work cycles with copious amounts of output followed by long periods of
inactivity. That describes me to a T, though.

I never thought I was bipolar.

------
abstractbill
This reads like my life story. I actually went a little further - I came close
to failing my undergrad degree because I was bored and partying too much, then
I put in a ton of effort at the last minute - enough that one of my lecturers
offered me the opportunity to do a PhD under him... then I started thinking
about the futility of it all again, and slacked-off the first couple of years
of the PhD!

Fortunately, the extreme ups-and-downs seem to be lessening as I get older.

------
mrtron
This article feels like it was written about me as well!

------
mynameishere
_It amplifies your power and enables you to embark on projects beyond the
scope of lesser languages like C._

Like Unix?

Oops. Bullshit detected.

~~~
cstejerean
You're missing the point. It amplifies the power of a single individual to do
something ON THEIR OWN beyond what they could accomplish with something like
C. Last time I checked UNIX wasn't written by ONE person.

~~~
mynameishere
_wasn't written by ONE person._

LOL. Two.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and his "point" is pointless. One person, two people, N people
are meaningless distinctions. Besides, most Lisp projects that have any real
success are group efforts as well, I'm sure. The REAL point is always the
same: What are those projects? Where are they? How _successful_ are they,
really? I'll point it out as often as this article gets re-posted: When you
compare C/C++ with Lisp based upon the _only thing that matters_ , results,
then Lisp is a near-complete failure. The applications that really matter,
that people really use, that have real performance, that solve real problems,
are written in C/C++/Blub, or some scripting language.

~~~
brlewis
I actually make almost daily use of a social news site that's written in a
Lisp dialect. The guy who wrote it had a prior success with Lisp. If you're
interested email me and I'll send you the link.

~~~
mynameishere
Okay, Yet-another-digg-clone versus
<http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html>

...and that list is woefully abbreviated.

~~~
Goladus
Suppose we are traveling through a forest and come to a ravine. The drop is
thousands of feet; so far away that we can't see who might have fallen to
their death while attempting to cross. There are two bridges. One is a jumbled
together mass of rotting boards and vines, the other is made of solid stone.
We know that 500 people have crossed the rotting wooden bridge successfully,
and know of only four who have crossed the stone bridge.

Which bridge do you think we should take?

~~~
Hexstream
Not exactly sure what you mean but my answer is:

Neither before also knowing how many people _attempted_ to cross each bridge,
so I know the success ratio for each.

