Hackers and Painters
As way of a cautious recommendation: About a year and a half ago, I was stuck for a week away from home traveling for work. Searching for something to read while I was gone, I popped into an Atlanta Barnes and Noble and futilely tried to find some books which were on my Amazon wish list. Of the five or six I looked for, they didn't seem to have any, save for "Hackers and Painters" (which required a storewide manhunt to track down where exactly they had decided to shelve it). I read it in my hotel room that night and spent the rest of the week enthralled by the thought of quitting my job…
Here's a request that's unlikely to be fulfilled but one I'll make anyway: assemble an essay collection aimed at high school / college students. In my ideal world, it would contain in about this order: 1) What You'll Wish You'd Known 2) What You Can't Say 3) Disconnecting Distraction 4) The Age of the Essay 5) Why Nerds are Unpopular 6) Writing, Briefly 7) Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas 8) Good and Bad Procrastination 9) How to Do What You Love 10) See Randomness 11) The Power of the Marginal 12) How Art Can Be Good 13) Taste for Makers 14) Two Kinds of Judgement 15)…
I just reread a bunch of the essays. There is very little that needs updating (and later essays address this). I get the sense that PG wrote the essays and that book so they could be read many years in the future. Call it a decade for the timely ones, and much more than that for the rest. A few of the updates would be along the lines of "This needs to change from the future tense." For example, this brief review of the iPhone from 2001: With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a…
This book was an epiphany for me! A colleague lended it to me, I started because the title sounded interesting, but I was thinking "here's another cocky all-knowing hacker type giving out cool advice". Boy, was I wrong. I first read the title essay and the truth of it struck me so much I took the day off (not literally, just hid somewhere where I coulnt be found) and finished the whole thing. That was almost three years ago. I've given quite a number of copies as presents and observed similar reactions. I go back and reread parts of the essays every now and then. A good/bad analogy is a good…
Same, though I wonder if his thoughts on languages has changed much, if at all. I was looking at learning a new language and considered Lisp, but decided on rails because it seems to be the most common language for web-apps these days, and therefore it should be easier to find good Rails developers than Lisp developers. I'm curious if PG feels the same way about using Lisp/Arc for business reasons vs. Lisp for technical reasons.
This is Matthew Butterick. I wrote “Why Racket? Why Lisp?” As I allude there, Paul Graham’s writings about Lisp (mostly in Hackers & Painters) helped persuade me to explore Lisp languages. (Those writings have also persuaded many others.) In particular, Arc's reliance on Racket persuaded me to take a serious look at Racket. So leaving aside quibbles about what “on top of” means — is Clojure not built “on top of” the JVM? Python “on top of” C? — Paul’s choice of Racket was influential in my choice too. (As it has been for many others.) As for software being “built in [one’s] head,” that…
I think the general attitude of lispers is frequently a large turn off. There is a lot of elitism, but it is often a needy Mensa-like elitism. There is almost a hidden plea attached "please respect us as the smartest" and the problem is, of course, that they can't point to any tangible, quantifiable method for gauging intelligence with respect to a language. I guess PG's "let's see if anyone is using it in 50 years" is a good measure in some case, but that implies that lisp as a language is less of a "computer language" (e.g. a language that is made for making machines do what we humans want…
Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham & Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung. Hacker & Painters : This book have many thought provoking ideas. compels you to think what you can do being in whatever position you are and how you can add value to the society through hacking. Complete Guide to Fasting is all about learning about our eating habits. As advanced societies what we have forgotten and how it has lead to so many lifestyle related issues and what simple and small things should be done to get us back on track.
I have found these books to be very influential in my thinking on web startups and building things in general: 1) Hackers & Painters - PG 2) Smart & Get Things Done - Joel Spolsky 3) Rework - Jason Fried 4) Getting Real - Jason Fried 5) Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston 6) Joel on Software - Joel Spolsky These are by far some of my favorites.
Seems almost every PG essay is controversial now. I got downvoted for pointing out someone was insulting him rather than criticising the essay. Which leads me to say - I don't think HN is particularly fanboish towards PG. His recent essays have been mixed in quality, and certainly not up to Hackers and Painters (which I just reread for the third time) and I do feel that HN has thoroughly called that out. There are nuggets of wisdom but also signs of how difficult it can be to write generally when your life paths constricts you somewhat. I really don't see a groupthink towards hero worship.…