I think the article describes ADHD rather than bipolar disorder. Selective attention, difficulty finishing what was started, poor fit for the current educational paradigms... Sounds like ADHD to me. There's nothing in the article that can be characterized as mania.<p>It's still one of my favorite posts though. Really resonated with me the first time I read it and I think it's just as relevant today.
I've used this essay as a justification to myself for why I got bad marks so many times.<p>Dropping this self-assessment was a big part of what "growing up" felt like to me.
I find it interesting that Clojure (and LISPs in general) have enjoyed an upsurge of attention since this 20th anniversary post. Maybe we're in the mania phase?<p>As an anecdote, I've now been on both language spectrums. In large C++ projects I can absolutely attest to the "Needs many people" claim. Now that I've worked in Clojure on projects of equal importance, it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone.
While the "BBM" tends to work alone and be frustrated at artiface at every corner, when you get a few or more working together, some really great things can come together. I've experienced that firsthand.
Wow, this felt like an eerily accurate cold reading!<p>I'm currently waiting for some Racket tests to finish, and this morning I tutored a C/C++ programming lab. The other lab tutor is a C++ hacker, and was saying how the course this year is much better than when he took it, since they had to do it in Lisp ;)
I think finishing projects is a learnable skill, not a fixed personality trait. It can be learned in quite a short time by repeatedly doing one-day projects and making them as finished as you can.
Well, now we have Clojure, ClojureScript, and projects like Untangled. Is Lisp on its meds now?<p>PS - I agree it should have been titled 'The ADHD Lisp Programmer'
>> He can see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his resources are insufficient.<p>Oh give it a rest already. You're talking about someone who can't finish
anything, and won't even bother to document his half-arsed, half-baked code,
as a "brilliant" mind? And on the basis of, what? That he (it's always a he,
in the article) used to get good grades at school. Not even university, mind-
the brilliance lasted until high school. But, you know, it's all because that
brilliant mind was such a great non-conformist who could see through all us
phonies.<p>The only thing missing is a magical ring and a birthmark that, once deciphered
using the ring, reads "Only You Can Save the World™". I won't bother to say
where the birthmark is and how the ring fits it.<p>As if we didn't have enough trouble already with rockstars and ninjas and people thinking they're artists because they wrote their first for-loop...
Article main points:<p>1. Mental disorder (bipolar or ADHD) is also beneficial for a person (brilliant bipolar mind).<p>2. There's nothing wrong with LISP language, only with people who use it.