I would be very interest in seeing how "getting lisp" enables you to write software that is more successful than the C and C++ software that runs the world. Perhaps you have written software in Lisp demonstrating this? Something you can show us?
Sorry, but I don't think you understand how many different skills are involved in building software that large companies can actually rely on.
Writing code is only one part of the job. I use Claude Code every day and I love it. It has made me much more productive. But I still have to guide it carefully, review every change, and fix the bugs and poor design decisions it introduces.
Personally, I'm looking forward to retirement. I expect there will be no shortage of consulting work helping companies clean up the AI-generated mess generated by inexperienced developers and overconfident middle manager with zero software development experience :)
I am seeing the complete opposite. 200k senior engineers can now do large scale projects way beyond what they could do just a year ago. My company is now able to implement stuff that we used to only dream about. Having 200k senior engineers who master AI coding is a true super power.
I trust the C++ committee to introduce new features in the most convoluted way possible, then spend the next 20 years trying to fix it, while adding even more syntax that makes my eyes hurt.
Case in point: templates. They are essentially a pure functional programming language embedded inside C++, expressed in a verbose syntax that barely resembles the rest of the language, and somehow makes even Java look concise.
It has been a slow-motion train wreck, with one questionable design decision after another. And a perfect example of why design by committee often leads to unnecessary complexity.
That hasn't been my experience at all. We've been using a custom code generator for years to build a large number of business-critical applications.
The generator takes a single specification and produces everything needed for the server, client, and databases (SQLite, Oracle, in-memory, etc.) to stay perfectly in sync.
It has worked really well for us and has been a huge productivity boost.
Yep learning is really a participation sport not a spectator sport. In other words, you only really learn by creating something not just reading about how to create something.
I completely agree. The more experienced you are, the more you get out of AI.
A friend of mine is super smart, but he's not a software developer. He tried to use AI to build software. And it worked well for small projects, but he always reached a point where the AI could no longer fix bugs or add new features.
The problems were often simple. An experienced developer could fix them with a few minutes of manual editing. Sometimes it was just an incorrect > in an XML file, but the AI would get completely stuck.
So IMHO AI works best when you know how to guide it and when to step in yourself.
Master's here. I already knew how to program before going to University. However I learned a lot about how to think more abstractly/mathematically about software. It has helped me a ton in my industry work and given me a clear advantage.
A typical problem with software is that development continues after the software has already reached its peak. Instead of making it better, new features and changes gradually make it worse. Eventually, enough users leave that it is no longer worth paying a team to keep working on it. And then the cycle starts again.
Cherry-picking individual technologies (such as jet engines) doesn't really say much. You could argue that companies like ASML and Rolls-Royce (jet engines) are evidence that Europe knows how to innovate and the US doesn't. That Airbus overtaking Boeing in a market once completely dominated by Boeing shows the US has lost its edge. That the European-designed ARM architecture winning the mobile phone wars shows the US has lost its chip design advantage. And so on.
But there are obvious counterarguments if you cherry-pick technologies where the US currently leads — Google Search, AI, and so on.
So I would be really careful extracting any kind of simple "truth" from examples like these. Different countries have different advantages, and those advantages shift over time. That's it.