The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

I used to attend meetings of a Lisp / FP users' group. Man, what a lineup of the brilliant unaccomplished. There were maybe one or two guys who were using Common Lisp at their jobs (one was at Amazon) and getting amazing stuff done with it. You could spot these guys immediately by their energy and social comfort. But the rest were always working on something cool and never finishing it. They were so far gone nodding in their opium parlor of thought there seemed little hope. I couldn't interest them in any practical project. They were only interested in the next high. <p>I used to think 'publish or perish' was a bad thing for academia. Now I don't. Everyone needs external social pressure.

Story of my life. Started CS in the age of 13 flunked out after 2 years. Been in &#38; out of universities (mainly CS &#38; philosophy) ever since, attracted to the ideal, disgusted by reality. All my life I abandoned most projects that took more than a a few weeks, but did some very cool things in these short time spans. But I think I found the cure, at least for me, a project that is superbly compelling... Suddenly my highs were longer and the lows not so low, and I have been finally been able to apply myself to a single project for a long time, over a year now. I think you need to find a project that will captivate you like the Everest captivated Sir Edmund Hilary, a monumental challenge in a field that interests you. Mine is developing a new machine learning algorithm.

I don't disagree with his portrayal of the brilliant failure, or even with the statement that such a person would be attracted to Lisp. But brilliant successes and brilliant failures both seem to be attracted to it, which implies that the brilliance is responsible for the attraction, not brilliant failure specifically.<p>He's even further off when he says that the reason Lisp isn't more popular is because of the mysterious quality that attracts such people. It's unpopular for more mundane reasons: the syntax looks odd, and there's no good, standard implementation with lots of libraries.

Comment I posted in reddit when this article turned up a year back.<p> "And here we are rushing to put in a mee too comment. I have known this about me for sometime. I had this thing about people. What ever you admit, you admit it because you are proud of it. Like for eg. I am always busy - yeah, you are proud of being busy. Or to bring the point out, one of my friends admitted to me that he suddenly realised that he was arrogant ( a BBM himself ), subconsciously he is proud of being arrogant.<p>My simple question: Does it have to be like this ? I mean, being Brilliant and a failure. C'mon guys, failure sucks. Big time. If you don't feel that, you don't have a problem. But if you do, consider this. Lets turn this inside itself in the true spirit of Lisp. Being BBMs we can come up with brilliant solutions to 'cope up with brilliance' while avoiding failure. Can't we ? Stop being proud. That's the point where it Starts. Post any coping mechanisms you have discovered over the years as reply to this thread. Thanx."

This is a SciAm article about praising kids for intelligence vs. praising for hard work:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655</a><p>Net result: kids praised for their intelligence tend to look for things that are easy or to appear smart. Challenges and mistakes often de-motiviate these kids. "Smart"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude where intelligence is a fixed, natural attribute and being able to accomplish something easily is a sign of natural intelligence. "Growth"-oriented kids tend to have an attitude that intelligence can grow and that challenges and mistakes are opportunities to learn. These kids tend to relish challenges, often getting even more excited over difficult problems. <p>I think that sums up LISP and C with regards to the brilliantly unaccomplished. <p>Being able to trivially do something in LISP that is difficult in C is good ... yet for someone who relishes a challenge, what does that mean to find a really hard problem in LISP that is nearly impossible in C?

Does anyone have a link to the thread from the last time this article was posted on news.yc? I tried a few google searches, but it seems that the link depth is too far back and it isn't indexed.

Yes that hits pretty close to home I must say... Here comes the depressive cycle again, LOL!<p>

I feel as if this article was written about me.

I never thought that being bipolar meant living through, frenetic herculean work cycles with copious amounts of output followed by long periods of inactivity. That describes me to a T, though. <p>I never thought I was bipolar.

This reads like my life story. I actually went a little further - I came close to failing my undergrad degree because I was bored and partying too much, then I put in a ton of effort at the last minute - enough that one of my lecturers offered me the opportunity to do a PhD under him... then I started thinking about the futility of it all again, and slacked-off the first couple of years of the PhD!<p>Fortunately, the extreme ups-and-downs seem to be lessening as I get older.

This article feels like it was written about me as well!

<i>It amplifies your power and enables you to embark on projects beyond the scope of lesser languages like C.</i><p>Like Unix?<p>Oops. Bullshit detected.