Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems.
You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfortable with and how good of a problem solver you are. So you can use lisp and I'll use ruby and at the end it'll all be a wash because the fundamental bottleneck will always be the speed at which you can formulate and solve problems and how quickly you can respond to market dynamics. All other choices are accidents of history.
Graham and his buddy were just good problem solvers.
You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfortable with and how good of a problem solver you are. So you can use lisp and I'll use ruby and at the end it'll all be a wash because the fundamental bottleneck will always be the speed at which you can formulate and solve problems and how quickly you can respond to market dynamics. All other choices are accidents of history.
Graham and his buddy were just good problem solvers.