Paul Graham - Hackers and Painters - Big Ideas from the Computer Age

The core of ITA's application is a 200,000-line Common Lisp program that searches many orders of magnitude more possibilities than their competitors, who apparently are still using mainframe-era programming techniques. I have never seen any of ITA's code, but according to one of their top hackers they use a lot of macros, and I am not surprised to hear it.

I'm not saying there is no cost to using uncommon technologies. The pointyhaired boss is not completely mistaken to worry about this. But because he doesn't understand the risks, he tends to magnify them.

I can think of three problems that could arise from using less common languages. Your programs might not work well with programs written in other languages. You might have fewer libraries at your disposal. And you might have trouble hiring programmers.

How big a problem is each of these? The importance of the first varies depending on whether you have control over the whole system. If you're writing software that has to run on a remote user's machine on top of a buggy, proprietary operating system (I mention no names), there may be advantages to writing your application in the same language as the OS. But if you control the whole system and have the source code of all the parts, as ITA presumably does, you can use whatever languages you want. If any incompatibility arises, you can fix it yourself.

In server-based applications you can get away with using the most advanced technologies, and I think this is the main cause of what Jonathan Erickson calls the "programming language renaissance." This is why we even hear about new languages like Perl and Python. We're not hearing about these languages because people are using them to write Windows apps, but because people are using them on servers. And as software shifts off the desktop and onto servers (a future even Microsoft seems resigned to), there will be less and less pressure to use middle-of-the-road technologies.

As for libraries, their importance also depends on the application. For less demanding problems, the availability of libraries can outweigh the intrinsic power of the language. Where is the breakeven point? Hard to say exactly, but wherever it is, it is short of anything you'd be likely to call an application. If a company considers it self to be in the software business, and they're writing an application that will be one of their products, then it will probably involve several hackers and take at least six months to write. In a project of that size, powerful languages probably start to outweigh the convenience of pre-existing libraries.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely.

How much do you lose by using a less powerful language? There is actually some data out there about that.

The most convenient measure of power is probably code size. The point of high-level languages is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it were, so you don't need as many to build a wall of a given size. So the more powerful the language, the shorter the program (not simply in characters, of course, but in distinct elements).

How does a more powerful language enable you to write shorter programs? One technique you can use, if the language will let you, is something called bottom-up programming. Instead of simply writing your application in the base language, you build on top of the base language a language for writing programs like yours, then write your program in it. The combined code can be much shorter than if you had written your whole program in the base language —indeed, this is how most compression algorithms work. A bottom-up program should be easier to modify as well, because in many cases the language layer won't have to change at all.

Code size is important, because the time it takes to write a program depends mostly on its length. If your program would be three times as long in another language, it will take three times as long to write—and you can't get around this by hiring more people, because beyond a certain size new hires are actually a net lose. Fred Brooks described this phenomenon in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month , and everything I've seen has tended to confirm what he said.

So how much shorter are your programs if you write them in Lisp? Most of the numbers I've heard for Lisp versus C, for example, have been around 7-10x. But a recent article about ITA in New Architect magazine said that "one line of Lisp can replace 20 lines of C," and since this article was full of quotes from ITA's president, I assume they got this number from ITA. If so then we can put some faith in it; ITA's software includes a lot of C and C++ as well as Lisp, so they are speaking from experience.

My guess is that these multiples aren't even constant. I think they increase when you face harder problems and also when you have smarter programmers. A really good hacker can squeeze more out of better tools.

As one data point on the curve, at any rate, if you were to compete with ITA and chose to write your software in C, they would be able to develop software twenty times faster than you. If you spent a year on a new feature, they'd be able to duplicate it in less than three weeks. Whereas if they spent just three months developing something new, it would be five years before you had it too.

And you know what? That's the best-case scenario. When you talk about codesize ratios, you're implicitly assuming that you can actually write the program in the weaker language. But in fact there are limits on what programmers can do. If you're trying to solve a hard problem with a language that's too low-level, you reach a point where there is just too much to keep in your head at once.

So when I say it would take ITA's imaginary competitor five years to duplicate something ITA could write in Lisp in three months, I mean five years if nothing goes wrong. In fact, the way things work in most companies, any development project that would take five years is likely never to get finished at all.

I admit this is an extreme case. ITA's hackers seem to be unusually smart, and C is a pretty low-level language. But in a competitive market, even a differential of two or three to one would be enough to guarantee that you'd always be behind.

This is the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss doesn't even want to think about. And so most of them don't. Because, you know, when it comes down to it, the pointy-haired boss doesn't mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it's his fault. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd.

Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is "industry best practice." Its purpose is to shield the pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is "industry best practice," and the company loses, he can't be blamed. He didn't choose, the industry did.

I believe this term was originally used to describe accounting methods and so on. What it means, roughly, is don't do anything weird . And in accounting that's probably a good idea. The terms "cutting-edge" and "accounting" do not sound good together. But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the wrong answers.

Technology often should be cutting-edge. In programming languages, as Erann Gat has pointed out, what "industry best practice" actually gets you is not the best, but merely the average. When a decision causes you to develop software at a fraction of the rate of more aggressive competitors, "best practice" does not really seem the right name for it.