Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
zingar · 2017-08-22
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Your comment made me think of a book that I read recently, Developer Hegemony[1]. It explores how the modern corporate forces us into three roles: pragmatists who opt out of the game and find their identity elsewhere ("I'd rather be fishing"), idealist middle management who sacrifice perspective and work twice as long for 10% more plus the illusion that one day they'll be recognised for their hard work (they won't), and opportunists who realise that the game is about perception management and are willing to sacrifice ethics for their place in the upper echelons.
I found myself pretty depressed after the first few chapters. The author even takes shots at the software development as a craft narrative, which is fascinating because my bubble is filled with people who devote their lives to this idea. Ultimately he outlines a vision where software people take advantage of the huge gains that a business can make through automation to carve out a comfortable niche outside of the corporate rat race. But it requires understanding business and marketing and not "being paid to practice your hobby" (which he reckons is the reality of most software jobs).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Hegemony-Erik-Dietrich/dp/0...
In the HyperCard thread on the front page right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20550189), someone linked a talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nd9DwCdQR0&feature=youtu.be...) on the history of educational software, and one of the presenters said something like, "Some technologies we are simply not mature enough for."
I think this is not a bad description of "the Lisp Curse." I definitely wasn't mature enough for Lisp when I first learned it---high on my knowledge of what was possible, surrounded by myopic fools, as I thought.
But that was years ago. I'm mature enough now. It is possible.
In my consulting work my partner and I have marveled at how managing technology projects is a skill --- learnable, but only with some effort and practice, and carrying relatively heavy requirements of being technically competent and having a context of the business.
That's the skill that's needed, IMO, to make Lisp "work." Lisp itself---and Clojure---are really not complicated languages. My boss teaches them to undergrads and they can be productive fairly quickly. They are complicated when someone has built a crappy, leaky tower of abstractions on them. Recognizing when you're in danger of doing so, and when it's not worth it given other factors (business value, maintainability, etc) is the key.
So I wonder, idly, if metaprogramming---no, really, the meta of programming, like "Don't Call Yourself A Programmer" (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... ) and "Developer Hegemony" (https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Hegemony-Erik-Dietrich/dp/0... )---might develop some more, esp. among the Lisp communities. When the language is no longer the barrier, you start to realize that other things are.