I know this type, but as an actual bipolar (mostly hypomania, no mania since mid-20s) programmer who is not unreliable (“go down without being rebootable”) and sees it as more of just another boring health problem than residence in a different world, I’ve read this essay several times in my life, and I think that it exaggerates the negatives of the “bipolar brilliant mind”. Many of these bad programmer behaviors have nothing, as far as I can tell, with biological mental illness or with programming languages.
Moreover, I don’t see this as Lisp-specific, and as a counterexample I’m more of a fan of Haskell, these days. Also, the community around Clojure is very much about getting things done, providing useful documentation, and generally making the user experience great– the antithesis of the negative stereotypes that are attached to Lisp programmers.
I think that this essay does a great job of capturing a certain attitude that I’ve seen among developers, but I don’t think it that deserves to be attached either to bipolar disorders or to Lisps.
Thanks for this. I have several serious mental health conditions about which I try to be visible (stigma is an awful thing and needs to be opposed). One of the many daily frustrations is seeing the labels that have a great deal of significance to who I am and who my friends are, used as metaphors by people who don’t understand them and are just looking for a cheap rhetorical trick to make a point. Very often this is done without any awareness that the labels refer to real people, let alone thought about the tangible harm that stereotypes and cliches do. Stigma kills people, and stereotypes make it hard to fight.
The lobste.rs audience has generally been pretty good about mental-health topics… which of course are off-topic here, except sometimes under the culture tag, but they occasionally come up, such as with posts about the author of TempleOS. For what it’s worth.
For a long time, “lisp” could be considered a convenient shorthand for any language used outside academia that didn’t suck horribly. But its usage here does feel pretty dated.
I don’t think I’m bipolar, but the description in the first half of this article resonated so strongly with me I got the chills. In high school I rushed things at the last minute and did well, like the article describes. I wouldn’t say college was much harder, but I hit a fit of… I don’t even know what to call it today. Depression/anxiety is close enough. I stopped going to class. I stopped paying rent for my dorms. I laid in bed until noon every day. I sat in the library and studied things that were interesting to me (Feynman, Knuth, matlab, and python) until 3am every night.
A couple years later I was working a dead end factory job and picked up a book on HTML. I talked my way into a part time web dev job. After that everything in my life went great. I became a LAMP developer for a big ecommerce site. Kept learning. Became the first engineer at a p2p distributed storage startup. Kept learning. Built some biggish systems (1 million writes/s) for ad-tech companies. Now I work from home with a great team, great pay, and a really cool product.
Then, with all due respect, you don’t know what “bipolarity” is.
Hypomania can be enjoyable and useful, but in this context it’s not very different from neurotypical states of consciousness– just longer-lived. Mania is often pretty terrible. The “happy” mania is much less common than the anxious (like, hard-core panic attacks) or angry kind, and even the “happy” kind is rarely productive.
Yeah, I mean, I alluded to it in my other comment, but using terms for real people as metaphors causes real harm. It’s not about being offended, it’s that it has side-effects.
But I wouldn’t say not to read the essay; it has some value as commentary on attitudes towards programming, although I agree with michaelochurch that the things it describes aren’t unique to Lisp.
It’s just that the writing choice is inherently distracting, and the deep inaccuracy in how the metaphor is used really makes it harder to absorb the author’s point.
I know this type, but as an actual bipolar (mostly hypomania, no mania since mid-20s) programmer who is not unreliable (“go down without being rebootable”) and sees it as more of just another boring health problem than residence in a different world, I’ve read this essay several times in my life, and I think that it exaggerates the negatives of the “bipolar brilliant mind”. Many of these bad programmer behaviors have nothing, as far as I can tell, with biological mental illness or with programming languages.
Moreover, I don’t see this as Lisp-specific, and as a counterexample I’m more of a fan of Haskell, these days. Also, the community around Clojure is very much about getting things done, providing useful documentation, and generally making the user experience great– the antithesis of the negative stereotypes that are attached to Lisp programmers.
I think that this essay does a great job of capturing a certain attitude that I’ve seen among developers, but I don’t think it that deserves to be attached either to bipolar disorders or to Lisps.
Thanks for this. I have several serious mental health conditions about which I try to be visible (stigma is an awful thing and needs to be opposed). One of the many daily frustrations is seeing the labels that have a great deal of significance to who I am and who my friends are, used as metaphors by people who don’t understand them and are just looking for a cheap rhetorical trick to make a point. Very often this is done without any awareness that the labels refer to real people, let alone thought about the tangible harm that stereotypes and cliches do. Stigma kills people, and stereotypes make it hard to fight.
The lobste.rs audience has generally been pretty good about mental-health topics… which of course are off-topic here, except sometimes under the culture tag, but they occasionally come up, such as with posts about the author of TempleOS. For what it’s worth.
For a long time, “lisp” could be considered a convenient shorthand for any language used outside academia that didn’t suck horribly. But its usage here does feel pretty dated.
I don’t think I’m bipolar, but the description in the first half of this article resonated so strongly with me I got the chills. In high school I rushed things at the last minute and did well, like the article describes. I wouldn’t say college was much harder, but I hit a fit of… I don’t even know what to call it today. Depression/anxiety is close enough. I stopped going to class. I stopped paying rent for my dorms. I laid in bed until noon every day. I sat in the library and studied things that were interesting to me (Feynman, Knuth, matlab, and python) until 3am every night.
A couple years later I was working a dead end factory job and picked up a book on HTML. I talked my way into a part time web dev job. After that everything in my life went great. I became a LAMP developer for a big ecommerce site. Kept learning. Became the first engineer at a p2p distributed storage startup. Kept learning. Built some biggish systems (1 million writes/s) for ad-tech companies. Now I work from home with a great team, great pay, and a really cool product.
Oddly enough, this is the very essay that solidified my interest in and love for lisp. The bipolarity of lisp is… attractive to me.
Then, with all due respect, you don’t know what “bipolarity” is.
Hypomania can be enjoyable and useful, but in this context it’s not very different from neurotypical states of consciousness– just longer-lived. Mania is often pretty terrible. The “happy” mania is much less common than the anxious (like, hard-core panic attacks) or angry kind, and even the “happy” kind is rarely productive.
I think the author was using “bipolar” as kind of a metaphor, not necessarily claiming that lisp programmers are literally bipolar.
Yeah, I mean, I alluded to it in my other comment, but using terms for real people as metaphors causes real harm. It’s not about being offended, it’s that it has side-effects.
But I wouldn’t say not to read the essay; it has some value as commentary on attitudes towards programming, although I agree with michaelochurch that the things it describes aren’t unique to Lisp.
It’s just that the writing choice is inherently distracting, and the deep inaccuracy in how the metaphor is used really makes it harder to absorb the author’s point.