How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
For a while now I&#x27;ve had a feeling that all the comments about lack of engineers(especially in software) are vastly underestimated. Probably around 10% of us is capable of doing actual software development. The rest writes plumbing and can handle the project for only as long as abstractions available through libraries can hold the complexity.<p>If we assume most of us don&#x27;t really know what we&#x27;re doing, that totally explains language preferences. We don&#x27;t choose the best tools, we choose the best tooling. And best tooling is the one which we can comfortably fit in our minds, so advanced concepts are mostly ignored and the hype wheel constantly turns. To put it shortly - smart people write better and better tools, so the rest can handle bigger and bigger projects writing mediocre code.<p>Of course, as every programmer, I live in constant fear that I am part of the plumbing crowd waiting to be exposed.