enigman

Males have a strong "play ethic". This, I think, explains why it's largely men who become world-class hackers. The male play-ethic has less to do with brains or ability, and more to do with desire and a compulsion to play with technology as a means of having fun. Women rarely exhibit this sort of behavior.

I don't think the industry is particularly sexist.

In theory, it should be possible to get better performance out of a Lisp application, since most versions of Common Lisp include a compiler. Ruby is interpreted at present and can be slower in some contexts. Runtime pauses for garbage collection can be quite noticeable in Ruby.

Uh-huh. This guy Carr reminds me of the famous New Yorker cartoon showing two scientists standing at a blackboard. On the left and right are a bunch of equations, and in the middle, connecting the left-side with the right-side is a cloud labeled "then a miracle occurs"...

See it here: http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?sid=40967

Or maybe he was the screenwriter of the movie "Independence Day" who thought that genius hacker Jeff Goldblum could easily connect his earthling laptop to the alien mother-computer and inject a virus that would destroy all their critical systems. Great cinema, lousy computer theory.

I work for a high-priced technical consulting company and regularly work closely with a number corporate 1000 companies. Guess what? Their problems are complex, their systems and applications are complex and wildly divergent (even when comparing companies within the same industry), and their management and IT people exhibit vastly different levels of skill. It is far from being a cookie-cutter world out there, and Carr is a fool for implying otherwise.

Carr is making a living by being controversial and inflammatory. He should spend more time on the ground actually working closely with some IT organizations and get to know their problems... then let's see if he believes this nonsense then (assuming he's even capable of understanding the details of what his IT friends actually do from day to day).

Shame on any execs who actually swallow this bilge...

I'm 53, almost 54. Not everyone over 30 is a technophobe or afraid of change.

Access to computers was very hard to come by when I was in my teens, but a lot of folks were interested nonetheless. By my early 20s the first PCs were hitting the market. A 48K basic Apple II cost about $2000, equivalent to perhaps $6000-$8000 today. As poor as I was then, I bought an Apple II system in 1979 and have maintained a strong interest in computers and technology ever since. People in my generation (and slightly older) started the personal computer revolution, and much of the earlier work on the internet.

One advantage of age is a perspective at how far we've come. In the early 80s I was a systems programmer for a large IBM/370 shop, running IBM's VM Operating System... the original "Virtual Machine" environment. We supported 500-1000 active/logged-in users on mainframes that had 16MB of RAM and perhaps 8GB of total disk storage. It was pretty cool in its day. Today, a $400 laptop could whup that system (in most respects). Amazing really.

My colleagues and I have gone from programming in PL/I and Assembler to Basic => Modula2 => C +. C++ => Java => Python/Ruby => and lately, a growing interest in that old warhorse, Lisp.

I can't sprint as fast as I once did, and it's harder to engage in marathon all-nighters than it was in my 20s, but in most ways I'm smarter and more capable now than I was back then. So please excuse me (and others like me) if we continue to stay engaged...