Hackers & Painters
Written on 18 Jul 2004
I’ve just finished Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters.
It’s a bit of a polemic (and none the worse for that), and some of the opinions on political economy are contentious, but he writes about truths of software development that most of us don’t get a chance to live up to in a hostile world. Perhaps the most striking point he makes is this one:
“So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn’t get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware but the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.” P186
Other languages are really convenience notations to make it easier to manipulate hardware, with varying degrees of abstraction.
My other favourite quotation is:
“Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster.” P107
Bill Clementson has extracetd acres of telling quotations in his blog, so I don’t need to, but he did cite one index entry that gives a flavour of the book:
suits
gorilla 25
law 45, 102
reign of, at Apple 228
salesmen's 76
technical decisions by 74, 192
Filed in: Software culture.