I’m fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp. I’m not saying that such geniuses don’t exist; they do. Here I’m using “myth” in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I’m thinking myth in the sense of Joseph Campbell, not Mythbusters.

Richard Stallman is a good example of the Lisp genius. He’s a very strange man, amazingly talented, and a sort of tragic hero. Plus he has the hair and beard to fit the wizard archetype.

Let’s assume that Lisp geniuses are rare enough to inspire awe but not so rare that we can’t talk about them collectively. Maybe in the one-in-a-million range. What lessons can we draw from Lisp geniuses?

One conclusion would be that if you write Lisp, you too will have super-human programming ability. Or maybe if Lisp won’t take you from mediocrity to genius level, it will still make you much more productive.

Another possibility is that super-programmers are attracted to Lisp. That’s the position taken in The Bipolar Lisp Programmer. In that case, lesser programmers turning to Lisp in hopes of becoming super productive may be engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking.

I find the latter more plausible, that exceptional programmers are often attracted to Lisp. It may be that Lisp helps very talented programmers accomplish more. Lisp imposes almost no structure, and that could be attractive to highly creative people. More typical programmers might benefit from languages that provide more structure.

I’m skeptical when I hear someone say that he was able to program circles around his colleagues and it’s all because he writes Lisp. Assuming such a person accurately assesses his productivity relative to his peers, it’s hard to attribute such a vast difference to Lisp (or any other programming language).

Programming languages do make a difference in productivity for particular tasks. There are reasons why different tasks are commonly done in different kinds of languages. But I believe talent makes even more of a difference, especially in the extremes. If one person does a job in half the time of another, maybe it can be attributed to their choice of programming languages. If one does it in 1% of the time of another, it’s probably a matter of talent.

There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. I think of Donald Knuth writing TeX in Pascal, and a very conservative least-common-denominator subset of Pascal at that. He may have been able to develop TeX faster using a more powerful language, but perhaps not much faster.

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