Paul Graham: just another mental midget

Paul Graham says languages he ``cavalierly dismissed'' before he ``even tried writing programs in'' ``have been bad'' and ``just smelled wrong'' because in his brain, they were ``designed for other people to use'', despite the creators of these languages being their biggest promoters. This is the mentality of a mental midget.

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. But this is something all programmers have to do. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS, Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others. They just smelled wrong.

Lisp teaches you a lot of things. It teaches you to judge languages based solely on their syntax: if it uses nothing but parenthesis, it's a lisp and it's good, if it uses syntax, it's a C-like and it's bad. It teaches you that Perl, C, and Ruby are all the same, because they all have syntax.
It teaches you to use Emacs, and furthermore it teaches you that Unix is bad because it thrived where Lisp didn't. It teaches you that the Unix style of doing things is plain wrong and bound to be filled with inconsistencies, an ill of which Lisp is exempt of.
It teaches you that you should write your code to run in 100 years, and that therefore you should avoid programming with threads or network sockets. Lisp teaches you to have some historical perspective, and TCP/IP won't be around much longer (I'm saying more than 60 years).
Lisp teaches you that the worth of a programmer is not in their skill but in the tools their use.