paul-graham

The people I've met who do great work, generally feel that they're stupid and
lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it's
only a matter of time until they're found out.

    -- Paul Graham
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What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don’t think that you can’t do
what other people can. And I agree you shouldn’t underestimate your potential.
People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And
most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful
attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the
story ends, they can’t help streamlining the plot till it seems like the
subject’s life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate
genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or
Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike
your other friends.

    -- Paul Graham
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It could be that in Java’s case I’m mistaken. It could be that a language
promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed by a committee for
a “mainstream” audience, hyped to the skies, and beloved of the DoD [=
“Department of Defense”], happens nonetheless to be a clean, beautiful,
powerful language that I would love programming in. It could be, but it seems
very unlikely.

    -- Paul Graham
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But for what it's worth, as a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't like
the look of Java:

1. It has been so energetically hyped. Real standards don't have to be
promoted. No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML. A real standard tends to
be already established by the time most people hear about it. On the hacker
radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of its
own merits.

    -- Paul Graham
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Bundling all these different types of work together in one department may be
convenient administratively, but it's confusing intellectually. That's the
other reason I don't like the name “computer science.” Arguably the people in
the middle are doing something like an experimental science. But the people at
either end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing
science.

The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. They happily set to work
proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department,
and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says “computer
science” on the outside. But for the hackers this label is a problem. If what
they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting
scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to
design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they
ought to be writing research papers.

    -- Paul Graham
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For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program
completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not
program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a
computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out
a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew
out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape.
Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and
oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of
debugging.

For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't
hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only
looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have
realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I
can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You
should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and
painters and architects do.

    -- Paul Graham
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I only discovered this myself quite recently. When Yahoo bought Viaweb, they
asked me what I wanted to do. I had never liked the business side very much,
and said that I just wanted to hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what
hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it. Programmers
were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of
product managers into code.

This seems to be the default plan in big companies. They do it because it
decreases the standard deviation of the outcome. Only a small percentage of
hackers can actually design software, and it's hard for the people running a
company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software
to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed
by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of
the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard
deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when
you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is
not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great
products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

    -- Paul Graham
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It's not true that those who can't do, teach (some of the best hackers I know
are professors), but it is true that there are a lot of things that those who
teach can't do. Research imposes constraining caste restrictions. In any
academic field there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren't.
Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is
usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research
papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results. The extreme
case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything
that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.

Though the situation is better in the sciences, the overlap between the kind
of work you're allowed to do and the kind of work that yields good languages
is distressingly small. (Olin Shivers has grumbled eloquently about this.) For
example, types seem to be an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite
the fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros-- without which, in
my opinion, no language is worth using.

    -- Paul Graham
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To the popular press, “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among
programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To
programmers,"hacker” connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who
can make a computer do what he wants-- whether the computer wants to or not.

To add to the confusion, the noun"hack” also has two senses. It can be either
a compliment or an insult. It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly
way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system,
that's also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the
latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant
ones.

Believe it or not, the two senses of"hack” are also connected. Ugly and
imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And
there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using
duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is
brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).

    -- Paul Graham
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Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project,
Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret
documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a
hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock
picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)

It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such
things. Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for
breaking into computers. This had only recently been declared a crime, and the
FBI found that their usual investigative technique didn't work. Police
investigation apparently begins with a motive. The usual motives are few:
drugs, money, sex, revenge. Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives
on the FBI's list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.

    -- Paul Graham
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When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound
more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote,
"is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.”

Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an
outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have
embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us
where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that
are the source of America's wealth and power.

Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. But be
careful what you ask for. You might get it.

    -- Paul Graham
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If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each
person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school.
You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There
are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot
of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison,
Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business
tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years
in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests
you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

    -- Paul Graham
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The aphorism "you can't tell a book by its cover” originated in the times when
books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be bound by each purchaser
according to his own taste. In those days, you couldn't tell a book by its
cover. But publishing has advanced since then: present-day publishers work
hard to make the cover something you can tell a book by.

I spend a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if I have by now learned to
understand everything publishers mean to tell me about a book, and perhaps a
bit more. The time I haven't spent in bookshops I've spent mostly in front of
computers, and I feel as if I've learned, to some degree, to judge technology
by its cover as well. It may be just luck, but I've saved myself from a few
technologies that turned out to be real stinkers.

    -- Paul Graham
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2. It's aimed low. In the original Java white paper, Gosling explicitly says
Java was designed not to be too difficult for programmers used to C. It was
designed to be another C++: C plus a few ideas taken from more advanced
languages. Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's
designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as
them. Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad:
Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were
designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

    -- Paul Graham
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The wrong people like it. The programmers I admire most are not, on the whole,
captivated by Java. Who does like Java? Suits, who don't know one language
from another, but know that they keep hearing about Java in the press;
programmers at big companies, who are amazed to find that there is something
even better than C++; and plug-and-chug undergrads, who are ready to like
anything that might get them a job (will this be on the test?). These people's
opinions change with every wind.

    -- Paul Graham
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Let's start by acknowledging one external factor that does affect the
popularity of a programming language. To become popular, a programming
language has to be the scripting language of a popular system. Fortran and
Cobol were the scripting languages of early IBM mainframes. C was the
scripting language of Unix, and so, later, was Perl. Tcl is the scripting
language of Tk. Java and Javascript are intended to be the scripting languages
of web browsers.

Lisp is not a massively popular language because it is not the scripting
language of a massively popular system. What popularity it retains dates back
to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of MIT. A lot of
the great programmers of the day were associated with MIT at some point. And
in the early 1970s, before C, MIT's dialect of Lisp, called MacLisp, was one
of the only programming languages a serious hacker would want to use.

    -- Paul Graham
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One thing hackers like is brevity. Hackers are lazy, in the same way that
mathematicians and modernist architects are lazy: they hate anything
extraneous. It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to
write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based
on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely
how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.

It is a mistake to try to baby the user with long-winded expressions that are
meant to resemble English. Cobol is notorious for this flaw. A hacker would
consider being asked to write

add x to y giving z

instead of

z = x+y

as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God.

    -- Paul Graham
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I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with
dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol,
for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual
descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language.

I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, "How
can you say that Java won't turn out to be a successful language? It's already
a successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you measure success by
shelf space taken up by books on it (particularly individual books on it), or
by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job.
When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something
more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like
Cobol.

This is just a guess. I may be wrong. My point here is not to dis Java, but to
raise the issue of evolutionary trees and get people asking, where on the tree
is language X? The reason to ask this question isn't just so that our ghosts
can say, in a hundred years, I told you so. It's because staying close to the
main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will be good to
program in now.

    -- Paul Graham
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This isn't just something that happens with programming languages. It's a
general historical trend. As technologies improve, each generation can do
things that the previous generation would have considered wasteful. People
thirty years ago would be astonished at how casually we make long distance
phone calls. People a hundred years ago would be even more astonished that a
package would one day travel from Boston to New York via Memphis.

    -- Paul Graham
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In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1
mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that stuck in my mind.

<<<

Python's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness

>>>

On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a
programming language. As far as I can tell, succinctness = power. If so, then
substituting, we get

<<<

Python's goal is regularity and readability, not power.

>>>

and this doesn't seem a tradeoff (if it is a tradeoff) that you'd want to
make. It's not far from saying that Python's goal is not to be effective as a
programming language.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- Succinctness is Power ( http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html )
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Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup
investors. The idea of them making startup investments is comic. It would be
like mathematicians running Vogue-- or perhaps more accurately, Vogue editors
running a math journal.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- How to Be Silicon Valley ( http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html )
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If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the
people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally
about attempts to set up "technology parks” in other places, as if the active
ingredient of Silicon Valley were the office space. An article about Sophia
Antipolis bragged that companies there included Cisco, Compaq, IBM, NCR, and
Nortel. Don't the French realize these aren't startups?

Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a silicon
valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup happens before they
want that kind of space. The key stage is when they're three guys operating
out of an apartment. Wherever the startup is when it gets funded, it will
stay. The defining quality of Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or
Google have offices there, but that they were started there.

So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is
those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a
company. And to reproduce that you need those people.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- How to Be Silicon Valley ( http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html )
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One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing
great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a
boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through
them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by
Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to
deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of
them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and
find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not
interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from
his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need
about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running,
but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill.
It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if
they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their
desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and
discipline is no longer necessary.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- What You'll Wish You'd Known ( http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html )
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Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd
like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile
compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be
just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the
reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to
ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To
say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly
found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a
union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- What You'll Wish You'd Known ( http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html#fb10 )
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I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter than
professors of French Literature.

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the
professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn
how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French
literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original
physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got
published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of
writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple
weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody
of a physics paper published in a physics journal?

    -- Paul Graham
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Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided to
commission someone to write an official Great American Novel. First there'd be
a huge ideological squabble over who to choose. Most of the best writers would
be excluded for having offended one side or the other. Of the remainder, the
smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of
ambition. The committee would choose one at the height of his career—that is,
someone whose best work was behind him—and hand over the project with copious
free advice about how the book should show in positive terms the strength and
diversity of the American people, etc, etc.

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge weight of
expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such a public commission,
he'd play it safe. This book had better command respect, and the way to ensure
that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but
if you kill people they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows,
America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that's what it would have to be
about. Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was
about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of
strength and diversity. When finally completed twelve years later, the book
would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels—roughly Gone with the
Wind plus Roots. But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller for a
few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host's autobiography.
The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the
more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for bogusness
like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

Maybe I got a little carried away with this example. And yet is this not at
each point the way such a project would play out? The government knows better
than to get into the novel business, but in other fields where they have a
natural monopoly, like nuclear waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime
change, you'd find plenty of projects isomorphic to this one—and indeed,
plenty that were less successful.

    -- Paul Graham
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The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples
to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right
kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous.
Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical
point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it.
On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you
were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not
part of the conversation.

    -- Paul Graham
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One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many still make you
register to read stories. I have yet to find a blog that tried that.

    -- Paul Graham
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And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach them through the
Times front page. Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot
or Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do than the channel.
The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work
for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting.
And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how
little overlap there is.

Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the president
notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he
makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog
in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what
he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is
nothing new in it.

Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about
things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks;
someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what do you learn
about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data
points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.

As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if
amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend
on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you
suddenly get competition.

    -- Paul Graham