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ruszkiyesterday at 5:50 PM1 replyview on HN

I don't understand how some people decide here, who the good programmers are. A lot of people reminded me a guy from West Palm Beach, who votes on elections solely on the principle of who has more "fame". Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. So I always interpreted his words with a hefty amount of grain of salt. And sometimes some comments have a list of "good" coders, then half of them is like these famous, but not good ones.


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TacticalCoderyesterday at 5:58 PM

> Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all.

pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code.

I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of them could have written a Lisp dialect.

It's not because Arc didn't reach the level of fame of Linux or Quake or Kubernetes or whatever that pg is not a good programmer.

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