Friday, February 22, 2002

Paul Graham's article "Being Popular" suggests that a developer of a programming languag assume his user is a genius rather than a bumbling fool that needs to be protected. The fool is still going to write a bad program but if you tie the hands of the genius he won't use your language. The user may do things with your language (or application) that you can't imagine. We might take his advice on our systems and allow the user to do more than we imagine rather than tie her specifically and exclusively to the requirements. 7:22:34 AM     This article is from Jon Udell's Radio blog. The article "Being Popular" is actually a pretty neat exploration of a programmer's mindset. Paul Graham is a Lisp maven. A long time ago (1987), I wrote application software in (a dialect of) Lisp. Another article of Paul's, Beating the Averages, reminds me why that made sense, and still would. In yet another essay, Being Popular, Paul discusses the importance of libraries (or frameworks), admittedly not Lisp's strong suite: I think a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages in the next fifty years will have to do with library functions. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. [Jon's Radio] 7:18:15 AM

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