Reading04

For the first years of college, when I would come up against a problem in any of my programming assignments, I would tend to consider and try to solve the problem using C++-style syntax in my pseudocode. This was because C++ was the first language I learned back when I was a freshman in high school and my dad was convinced that I needed to know how to use it. I took everything from a perspective of, “how would you implement this in C++?” However, as I continued on into classes like Systems Programming where Python would appear more readily, I figured out that thinking at a level above of C++ is insanely easier. No longer did I have to worry about memory when constructing functions and for loops and whatever. Sure, there are benefits to having that fine-grain control over the system, but whatever it is, I haven’t needed it.

Nonetheless, I still have such a soft spot for C++ and will never fail to defend it when, inevitably, someone will say how miserable it is to debug arcane error codes during compilation, or, heaven forbid, when a segfault occurs. All this is to say that my preference for C++ has nothing to do with its purported advantages over other languages. I’m of the opinion that choice of programming language does not matter unless in specific cases, such as when your device maybe only supports a Java Virtual Environment or something like that. In the end, it really matters how easy you want it to be to program your thing, or if you want it to run faster. 90 percent of the time, I’m gonna choose Python since it’s by leaps and bounds easier to write then something like C or C++.

Paul Graham argues in “Beating the Averages” that his use of Lisp gave him a competitive advantage over his competitors. According to Graham, “If other companies didn’t want to use Lisp, so much the better. It might give us a technological edge, and we needed all the help we could get.” In the essay, he says that using Lisp was an “experiment” to see if using a language could give you an edge against competitors. Graham said it did, since his site was, according to him, “always far ahead of them in features.” This argument seems kind of bogus to me. Of course he thinks that his product was better; his was the one that was his and his was the one that made millions.

However, this heavily discounts the effect that luck has in the business world, and there’s no way that anecdotal evidence that a programming language gave Graham the advantage is enough to convince me that it matters in the long run. As pointed out in class, most successful tech entrepreneurs attribute their success, in large part, to luck. There are hundreds of people trying to make it big in the industry, and it’s almost impossible to say that the successful ones just work a bit harder than the unsuccessful ones. That’s totally unfair to the people who break their backs for years, only to see no return in the end. Graham wants to make it seem like it’s his “cunning” or “intellect” or “foresight,” but really, it’s just luck, and no choice of programming language is going to make that big of a difference.