Farls: Hackers in the Bazaar

Ahh, the classic "how do I speedrun retirement" conversation we had a few weeks ago. Startups do  seem like a "get rich quick" scheme...if you do it right. Find a gap, start to fill it, and (hopefully) get bought. While there aren't any rules on what one is  or is not  allowed to pursue, the wealth that comes with developing technology has most definitely polluted the waters with more "robots," leaving fewer True Hackers. "When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else." I read Outliers  by Malcolm Gladwell for a class in high school and ever since, the 10,000 hour rule has always stuck with me: all of the pros have put at least 10,000 hours into perfecting their craft. The  Beatles played 10000 hours worth of practices/gigs together before they solidified themselves as greats. Bill Gates spent 10,000 hours tinkering with computers to fully understand them. While I don'

" Consider Cobol." I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT COBOL IS. Maybe this is a me problem, but this language was referenced way too many times for me to draw any meaning from those points. Also, it's been a little weird trying to wrap my head around 2003 Python. I'm assuming it's a much different (younger) language than it is today. "The reason Latin won't get you a job is that no one speaks it. If you write in Latin, no one can understand you. But Lisp is a computer language, and computers speak whatever language you, the programmer, tell them to." I've always wondered what the real  difference between languages was aside from use-case. Why isn't there one language that can do everything  well? I guess that's what Python aims to do, especially with its massive support as an open-source language. As Graham stated, you should always use the most powerful language or, if this doesn't best fit your use-case, find the one with the greatest library supp