| "I began to write a reply to your question, but decided that it deserved its own post" That isn't really a reply to the question posed. Just more ranting and raving. Sample: "Yes, my dear bean counters, you can measure productivity. I would no more ask you to stop in your attempts at its measurement than I would ask mosquitoes to stop sucking blood. You can measure productivity – even of Lisp; even of political philosophies. You will simply need to secure a very large bag of beans – one deep enough to hold a bean for every twist and turn of a century of tinkering, politicking, and everything else associated with the messy business of successfully thinking new thoughts." The best interpretation of this drivel is that you want people to accept your claims of superior productivity just on your say so but not ask for any evidence because asking you back up your unsubstantiated claims of superiority would be "bean counting". Forget the scientific studies. There is another kind of "evidence" in programming - write code that is evidently superior. The best way to show that (say) Linux is an "inferior" operating system is to build one better. Not talk about making one sometime in the misty future. Build. Then talk. Endless rants aren't as good. As silentbicycle says elsewhere "I just take issue with how some particularly vocal Lispers have been sitting on the sidelines going, "Our language is THE BEST LANGUAGE" for decades. ("Sick of being a blub programmer and working in Blub? Try our Language For Smart People.") They're so used to being smug because their language was thirty years ahead of its time, fifty years ago." |
The obvious interpretation is that he's saying something like "the usual definition of productivity is flawed and myopic, and gets in the way of realizing the power of Lisp". The paragraph you quoted (implied as a representative sample) is indeed pretty much content-free, because it was a gratuitous flourish at the end.
Of course there is indeed a lot of assertion couched in flowery language there, but that's not the same as "because I say so and if you disagree you're a poopyhead" which is what you seem to have gotten from it. You also seemed to miss the part where he argued that multiple major concepts in modern software originated on the Lisp Machine, which would seem to more than qualify as "building something better".
I'm assuming you're not naive enough to think that "better" equates to "successful", which is another issue entirely.