The Bipolar Lisp Programmer | Hacker News Reader

The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

lambdassociates.org

40 pointsnpk8 comments

Is it really that they "run out of steam" before finishing their projects? It seems to me that they finish all the interesting problems of the original project and are distracted by an even grander problem that still has unsolved problems. The original project's interesting problems have usually been solved and all that remains is mundane crap.

I also think the extended periods of melancholy are avoidable. After all, the BBM is melancholic because the real world he has to deal with is phony and filled with bullshit, not because he gets a kick out of wearing black lipstick and posting emo entries to LiveJournal. So what's the solution? Save him from the phony bullshit. Put him (or yourself) in an environment where he is stimulated and working on real problems without having to play society's idiotic games. Academia is my standard example of this.. there's just a lot of hoops to jump through to accomplish nothing, and the metric of GPA doesn't actually correlate to anything useful like "knowledge acquired" or "mastery of the subject", but instead reflects the amount of busy work done by the student. Learning is simply a happy side-effect that might happen while maximizing GPA. Even professors seem to spend a big chunk of their time just producing "epsilon papers" that contribute nothing other than an impression that the professor has been busy. </standard academia rant>

Anyway, put the BBM in a suitable environment and they'll be melancholic less of the time. I think.

And where do you find such an environment?

I'm sure it differs for each person, but personally I'd say the most important things are: get out of academia, get freedom, find a satisfying job with interesting problems and management who are technical, and work on interesting stuff in your free time.

Interesting observation.

Even more interesting, from entrepreneurial point of view, I think, is that there is an opportunity here. One problem with people of the BBM type (what the author calls "brilliant bipolar mind") is that they get depressed before they finish things although they might have a brilliant idea. So you the opportunity is for non-depressive folks to finish the tasks and offer something that the community can use.

Here's the follow-up:

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-05/msg00080.html

I've thought a lot about both pieces since they were posted to reddit a while ago, but haven't gotten anywhere. I'm not sure if knowing whether or not I have a bipolar mind is really useful in the end.

This might be a typical profile of a Lisp programmer, but not everyone is like that. I think my own intelligence is right in the sweet spot -- smart enough that I don't get stuck, but not so smart that I get bored and can't finish things.

Let's see: who here identifies themselves with a BBM?

I do. Though, my breakdown came during my sophomore year of high school and by college I had already pieced myself back together and put things in perspective. Incidentally, "Why Nerds are Unpopular" was one big factor in helping me do so. I found the essay through Slashdot; it was the first I'd ever heard of Paul Graham.

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