>> If one does it in 1% of the time of another, it’s probably a matter o...

losvedir · on April 26, 2011

>> The original article seems to base this on the flawed assumption talent and choice of tools are not related.

The article does say they could be related:

"Another possibility is that super-programmers are attracted to Lisp."

That would be a strong correlation. However, the article is about causality, though. If the truth is that

Programming talent -> Choose Lisp

Then it is not necessarily the case that

Choose Lisp -> Programming talent

rbanffy · on April 26, 2011

Sorry for the poorly thought out post.

Anyway, as was pointed out elsewhere, someone can write a web CRUD in Rails in 1% of the time it would take to write it in C with Apache modules (or ISAPI DLLs). Choosing the wrong tool can have disproportionate effects.

Having a large tool set is one of the hallmarks of the great programmer.

One example off the top of my head: a friend of mine was struggling for a week to deliver a simple J2ME (it was 2002 or 2003) app using Eclipse. I directed him towards NetBeans. The product was ready that same afternoon. The IDE support in NetBeans was so complete his job was more a fill-in-the-blanks than anything else.

losvedir · on April 26, 2011

Oh, I see what you mean. I agree completely.