Prompts for “Beating the Averages” / “The Rise of Worse is Better”

Due on Monday, November 5 by 10pm

Read “Beating the Averages” by Paul Graham, and then (the very short) “The Rise of Worse is Better” by Richard Gabriel.

Commit your response as a PDF to your short responses repository. You are encouraged (but not required) to use LaTeX to typeset your response.

1. Graham and Gabriel both talk about “success” in terms of survival. Are they saying the same thing, or different things?
2. Both authors are big proponents of Lisp. Graham has his own dialect of Lisp, on which runs Hacker News, and Gabriel was the primary developer behind the Common Lisp Object System. Do you think that their advice is biased by or informed by their experiences with Lisp? Do you think that their advice is good?
3. Do you love, hate, or feel ambivalent about programming? What about computer science? Do you think that your experience with the former has affected your perception of the latter?