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by James Robertson.
Original Post: So obvious, it must be wrong
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Joel Spolsky let slip something that I'm pretty sure he hasn't thought through:
On Lisp: And I have the ultimate respect for Paul Graham -- I think there's a good probability that in a year or two we will credit him with being the man who solved spam. But I think that if you try to ignore the fact that millions of programmers around the world have learned lisp and don't prefer to use it, you're in the land of morbid cognitive dissonance.
That sounds reasonable... but I don't think he (or many other people in the tech world) like that line of reasoning at all when it extends to the political. Think about it - Joel's argument is "The majority is always right". Well. If that's the case, abolish the courts now, and let's just do referendums for everything. What's that? You don't think that the majority is always right?
If not, then why is a majority of developers always right? Do they have some "special knowledge" that the general public lacks? Somehow, I don't think so...
And obtw - I'm not sure that you could make the claim that "millions" of developers have tried out Lisp, or Smalltalk (insert niche language here). More likely it's in the tens or hundreds of thousands - at best
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