Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

There is a big overlap with Graham's essays freely available on his website. The book feels a bit unstructured with the chapters only loosely related. There are definitely some great ideas and thoughts in the book, but there are some chapters I couldn't identify with.

It's just a bunch of Paul Graham's superb essays collected into one book. Unfortunately the selection of technical posts is showing its age. I'd give the first half of the book five stars and the latter half three, so decided to settle on four. You probably aren't going to have your toes tickled by the second half if you aren't ROBUSTLY INTO LISP.

Hackers & Painters is a celebration of computer engineering and the people that make it possible, developers. Graham is passionate about the things he writes, and he is passionate about a lot of things - the needs of the modern developer, the wants of future ones, tech entrepreneurship, the design programming languages and the superlative position Lisp holds among them. There is also a Steve Ballmer-like undertone of "developers developers developers" running throughout the text, which is a bit too strong at times but inspiring nonetheless. Where the essays fall short are when they attempt to draw analogies between art history and the practice of computer science. There exist beautiful connections there, to which Godel Escher Bach is show more testament, but none of appear in Hackers & Painters. The connections that do appear seem either forced or too simplistic.

The main takeaways of this book are an ego-boost and some decent rule-of-thumbs for designing computer systems, especially programming languages. This book seems written with developers and entrepreneurs in mind, and those are the two demographics that will enjoy it most.

Favourite essays: What You Can't Say, Mind The Gap, A Plan For Spam show less

I really enjoyed this book, it ended with a lot of technical parts of Lisp but, especially the beginning, it dealt with a lot of arguments/ideas that were treated in a pretty new way. His ideas about startups and wealth in particular I found very interesting. There was also a few funny moments when he was talking about his ideas for spam filtering or server-based websites and I thought, "Huh, isn't that what was always done". I didn't realize he(/his company) were the ones who pioneered bayesian spam filtering or server-based websites. It made we want to look at lisp again

Enjoyed reading Paul Graham's essays. It is quite dated, for e.g, lots of reference to Web in the 1990s, 2000s time when Yahoo was a prominent .com company. Some of his opinions on wealth creation are still applicable in 2020. But we have to read his essays with plenty of skepticism. He sings praise for lisp and instills some desire in the reader to study lisp and start a startup.

This book is collection of essays (I think all of them are online). Hackers and Painters was a quick and amusing read. The essays cover many topics; my favorites were those on the social habits of hackers and on language design. The language design essays were interesting even though I disagreed with them in many places. For one thing, types are good! Types are a burden when writing code, certainly, but they are vital for reading code. I find it much easier to read code with type annotations because then I know what each variable is supposed to do. Since code is read much more often than it is written (or so says conventional wisdom), types are important. That said, I am a big fan of both languages with type inference and languages show more where types do not need to be added while programming but can be added to provide additional guarantees to the programmer. show less

People come to programming with many different, sometimes overlapping motivations. Some like the mathematical dimension, the beauty of elegant algorithms. Many like the satisfaction of solving a problem. Others think it good money with career prospects. In Hackers & Painters, Graham frames a view on those who like the hands-on art of programming, the same ones drawn to writing, painting and other arts. Programming may seem a pale cousin of the arts, compared to writing or painting, but there is an art to it. Graham calls these sorts hackers, for their need to bend, break or invent patterns in pursuit of their art.

In the popular press, hacking is associated with breaking into computers or creating viruses that damage them. “To the show more programmer, ‘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” (50). Novice programmers perceive languages to be quite different, while those with a little more experience claim they are all the same. But the hackers, the masters, are sensitive to the variations in their tools, and how they shape the work. Graham favours Lisp as his sketching language. I dabbled in Lisp years ago; I am persuaded to take another look.

I have psychology and library science degrees, not computer science. What I know about programming and computers I picked up on the fly. Turns out that many people come to programming accidentally. Good programming is not really science, says Graham. Hacking is doing, like art. Those who can do it often find themselves making some sort of living at it simply because of economics; it is much harder to make a living at painting. These people often do not fit comfortably in the corporate mold, but rather in small startups, where the lean environment and rewards for hard work are better suited to innovation.

Graham paints an invigorating portrait of hackers, though some of his notions completely missed my boat. Like many books on computers, some ideas already seem quaint, such as his discussions of ASPs and langauge issues around typing and garbage collection. Other ideas border on facile, such as his view that generating wealth in the modern world is all good because it is a function of hard work. No corruption in the modern world? He also believes that information technology decreases the gap between the rich and the poor. By its very nature, technology tends toward to centralized control by a small group. In any case, the book does have many good ideas, and I suppose hackers are likely to make as many mistakes as worthy breakthroughs.

http://johnmiedema.ca/2009/07/17/hackers-painters-by-paul-graham-book-review/ show less