Paul Graham's latest essay has kicked up quite a storm in the developer community (see here and here for two discussions on this). Paul doesn't have nice things about Java, which has not gone down well with the Java crowd.

Though Paul's attitude may be (and in fact has been) construed as elitist, I feel that what he says has quite a lot of merit. It may be unpalatable, but it's true, nonetheless. I think this person has it right when he claims that people who code 9 to 5 do not have the soul of a programmer. Personally speaking, I know that I will not get anything out of Vajra, except personal satisfaction, but this does not stop me from working on it (if it had not been Vajra, it would have been something else). The point is that I code because I want to, not because I can make money out of it (I work in an IT consulting firm, BTW, so I do make money from coding, as well. Marc Fleury has an interesting analogy when he compares people working on OSS projects in their spare time to aspiring actors waiting tables in their day job).

On a related note, there is a perception that AutoCAD and Emacs are the only killer apps in Lisp. Orbitz is another such app (may be not at the level of the other two, though).