Beating the Averages

At the beginning of the article by Paul Graham, he explains to us the basics of how startups work and have worked for many years. If a startup doesn’t show something new, something different, or something better, then it is doomed to fail. If you do what the average does, you will fail the same way. Not only by being the first but also by being able to stay on top of its competitors when the time came, was why Graham’s startup was so successful that yahoo bought it. Now almost 20 years after, yahoo’s shopping site has lost a great amount of popularity to its competitors like amazon and eBay.

Now, Graham continues on a topic very similar to the one on the previous article, The Semicolon Wars. How different languages look to someone who is already so familiarized with a certain programming language, that all the others seem either inferior in terms of computing power or are simply strange and don’t deserve the time of day. What they fail to realize is that a different language, as different or strange as it may seem, is on a higher lever of power for the features it has. In the example of lisp as a very powerful language, features like macros are used to show its power to anyone not familiar with it.

To finish up, it is simply stated how Lisp’s unpopularity is one of the languages greatest advantage, when competitors don’t understand the tools that you are using, they won’t know what to expect, and will not be able to prepare against it. A way to know what your competitors are playing with, what technologies they have, is to view the job listing they post. Graham states that the less popular a language they want, the more IT focused that company will be, and with that, the bigger it would be as a threat.