i don't understand the point of articles like this. should students give up because they are not the smartest person they know? id rather give it a shot than spend the rest of my life rationalizing that i just didn't have the inborn ability.
they get weeded out because they didn't enjoy the subject enough and were doing it for reasons like their parents wanted them to or so they could get a high paying job. if you eat, breathe and shit math then you are not going to drop out of it.
what converted me was having to do highly stateful, real time statistical models. you have data coming in from multiple sources and you have to do lots of computation on them. if you don't have persistent data structures then it becomes so easy for the program to use data from the future or excised noise and your results will just be completely wrong and it's very hard to find the source of error.
if youve never done FP, then it does feel really weird. but once you are used to it, so many things become much easier.
clojure's interop is perfect and i have never had any problems. if the library is bad then you can just wrap it in clojure and put a custom api on top of theirs but ive only had to do that once and it was a groovy library.
linux on the desktop isnt really a good example because most people don't care about changing the default OS and gamers make up a large %age of people who build their own computers. linux never really stood a chance.
the idea was that you had to take a 5x pay cut to do interesting work in a good environment with smart people. it's interesting that it has reduced to a 2x paycut.
im skeptical that any amount of damage bill gates might have done to technology is outweighed by millions of vaccines and thousands of schools in developing countries.
> Paul Graham has a philosophy degree and most of his wealth came from people skills: convincing Blackwell and Morris to hack for him, and later convincing young engineers to hack for him.
id think having a deep enough knowledge on lisp to fill two books probably had something to do with it as well.
ok, maybe he fits some form of extremism, but labeling him as such still isn't enough to dismiss him. William Lloyd Garrison was called that, and so was Joeseph McCarthy. it doesnt really mean anything and it clouds the discussion.
you cant call someone like RMS extreme just because his views are REALLY DIFFERENT. there is a lot of room on the spectrum between expressing your views non violently and actually forcing them onto people.