like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them out by switching to a risc instruction set ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They 're half technology and half religion.[6] And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp the mid 1960s, are still terra incognita Obviously, the median language has enormous momentum. I'm not proposing that you can fight this powerful force What Im proposing s exactly the opposite: that, like a practitioner of Aikido, you can use it against your opponents If you work for a big company, this may not be easy. You will have a hard time convincing the pointy-haired boss to let you build things in Lisp, when he has just read in the paper that some other language is poised, like Ada was twenty years ago, to take over world. But if you work for a startup that doesn'thave pointy-haired bosses yet, you can, like we did, turn the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can use techno logy that your competitors, glued immovably to the median language, will never be ble to match If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they 'll get the wrong candidates During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an It flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried Back when I riting books about Lisp, I used to wish everyone understood But when we started viaweb I found that changed: I wanted everyone to understand Lisp except our competitors----------------------------------------------------------------- like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them out by switching to a risc instruction set. Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion.[6] And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity. Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now, just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp the mid 1960s, are still terra incognita. Obviously, the median language has enormous momentum. I'm not proposing that you can fight this powerful force. What I'm proposing is exactly the opposite: that, like a practitioner of Aikido, you can use it against your opponents. If you work for a big company, this may not be easy. You will have a hard time convincing the pointy-haired boss to let you build things in Lisp, when he has just read in the paper that some other language is poised, like Ada was twenty years ago, to take over the world. But if you work for a startup that doesn't have pointy-haired bosses yet, you can, like we did, turn the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can use technology that your competitors, glued immovably to the median language, will never be able to match. If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they'll get the wrong candidates. During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. Back when I was writing books about Lisp, I used to wish everyone understood it. But when we started Viaweb I found that changed: I wanted everyone to understand Lisp except our competitors