Lisp Hackers: Interviews with 100x More Productive Programmers

The idea of this series came to the author’s mind after European Common Lisp Meeting 2011 where he had had a chance to meet in person some of those mythical 100x more productive programmers. And the points he wanted to make were:

• these guys do exist, and it’s really interesting to know how they work and think.
• it makes sense to show who are the real people using this obscure and mythical language Common Lisp, why do they use it and what they do with it.

This book is a collection of short interviews with 14 prominent individuals from different parts of the world, from Australia to Canada, and of different occupations, from low-level programmers to physicists and musicians, asking them a more-or-less similar set of questions on the following topics:

• their general attitude to programming
• attitude towards and experience with Lisp
• stories of real-world Lisp projects

Overall, this should give an insight into why people use Lisp, as well as help the readers gain some new experience and improve as programmers. How were these individuals chosen? People who possess at least 2 of the following 3 essential qualities:

• a renown Lisp open-source contribution
• prominence in the community
• experience working for successful Lisp companies
• and a good perspective on other languages was considered as a pleasant bonus