How good are people at making decisions? http://danluu.com/bad-decisions/
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A side effect of the lack of data on practices is that charismatic people with compelling stories have outsized influence. How many folks learned Lisp because of this story? The two most valuable startups of that era (GOOG&AMZN) were Blub-based, but this story still has currencypic.twitter.com/mxZJd5kiu5
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I disagree on GOOG. Yes, the languages were blub, b/c their killer idiom was at another level: dist-sys. Protobufs,stubby,mapreduce,gfs
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That's the point! PG focused on languages and claimed Lisp would give companies a technical moat, but the companies that actually built technical moats did so on blub. The next startup to build great infra was arguably FB, despite using the blubbiest blub that ever blubbed.
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I agree with the sentiment, but was reminded of something I read: "The original brilliant guys and gals here only allowed two languages in Amazon's hallowed source repository: C and Lisp." (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel …) The story may well be apocryphal, of course.
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But "charismatic with strong opinions and a compelling narrative" also fits Mr. Yegge to a T. His rants are cut from the same cloth as Mr. Graham's.
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And we are very good in believing what we want to believe, even if data were available.
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This may be an egregious generalization, but the idea that sharp-knife PLs might be better suited to small teams and blub langs for managing dev armies always made a sort of sense to me, and correlates with these data points.
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Which takes nothing away from the good point that charismatic people with compelling stories can and do have outsized influence.
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Well, Google wrote a LOT of python, and the total tech stack of Amazon uses a lot of different languages. One takeaway from this might be "implementation matters a lot, but business model matters more."
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GOOG was Python, AMZN was Perl. Both mentioned by PG in the story as rating some worry, by implication to use Yegge's phrase to some they are an acceptable Lisp.
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