Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

Eric Raymond I owe special thanks not just for his ideas but for his example in writing about hacking.

Thanks to Eric Raymond in hackers and painters

I learned about hacking from many people, but I learned about painting mostly from one: Idelle Weber, a great teacher all the better for teaching by example. I’m deeply indebted to her and her husband Julian for years of kindness.

The better teacher is one that teaches with the example

This is the Computer Age. It was supposed to be the Space Age, or the Atomic Age. But those were just names invented by PR people. Computers have had far more effect on the form of our lives than space travel or nuclear technology.

Hackers & painters is a book to explain the computer age from the point of view of his makers

Why do hackers care so much about free speech? Partly, I think, because innovation is so important in software, and innovation and heresy are practically the same thing. Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything. You have to when you work on machines made of words that are as complex as a mechanical watch and a thousand times the size.

Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn’t have taken it.

Smart or popular for wich are you ready to give all your energy for

The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

The popular kids learned to be popular, the nerds learned to be smart

in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

Why do you attack the others?

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

School are like jails

most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don’t really take it seriously — not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions. In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo’s Les Miserables. I don’t think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff ’s Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn’t have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff ’s Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

Learning or just going through the motions

So why do universities and research labs continue to judge hackers by publications? For the same reason that “scholastic aptitude” gets measured by simple-minded standardized tests, or the productivity of programmers by lines of code. These tests are easy to apply, and there is nothing so tempting as an easy test that kind of works.

There is nothing so tempting as an easy test that kind of works

If universities and research labs keep hackers from doing the kind of work they want to do, perhaps the place for them is in companies. Unfortunately, most companies won’t let hackers do what they want either. Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

Hackers in research labs and companies

So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They’re going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they’re not going to read the manual. The best system I’ve ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1984. It did what software almost never does: it just worked.7

They're going to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will

Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Programs should be written for people to read

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas. Convention has less hold over them.

Conventions has less hold over on nerds

So if you want to figure out what we can’t say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make un-sayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

What we can't say

If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.

Think outside the box is: innovation

have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are the interesting ones

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller’s metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a “witch-hunt.”

Attack with fiction

Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society’s bad moods.

Discount society's bad moods

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate new speech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

Hackers attitude of disobedience

It is by poking about inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation. No thanks, intellectual homeowners may say, we don’t need any outside help. But they’re wrong. The next generation of computer technology has often — perhaps more often than not — been developed by outsiders.

It is by poking about inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation

I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.

Country with more civil liberties, country with more money

programs that pretended to be users (to measure performance or expose bugs), programs for diagnosing network troubles, programs for doing backups, interfaces to outside services, software that drove an impressive collection of dials displaying real-time server statistics (a hit with visitors, but indispensable for us too), modifications (including bug fixes) to open source software, and a great many configuration files and settings.

Programs at viaweb

This was not how things worked at Viaweb. At Viaweb, support was free, because we wanted to hear from customers. If someone had a problem, we wanted to know about it right away so we could reproduce the error and release a fix.

Support help the programmers to find the bugs

We had general ideas about things we wanted to improve, but if we knew how we would have done it already. What were we going to do in the next six months? Whatever looked like the biggest win. I don’t know if I ever dared give this answer, but that was the truth. Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf. When we thought of good ideas, we implemented them.

Feature plannig at viaweb

all the programmers have to be to some degree system administrators as well. When you’re hosting software, someone has to be watching the servers, and in practice the only people who can do this properly are the ones who wrote the software. At Viaweb our system had so many components and changed so frequently that there was no definite border between software and infrastructure. Arbitrarily declaring such a border would have constrained our design choices.

devops at viaweb

Watching users can guide you in design as well as optimization. Viaweb had a scripting language called RTML that let advanced users define their own page styles. We found that RTML became a kind of suggestion box, because users only used it when the predefined page styles couldn’t do what they wanted. Originally the editor put button bars across the page, for example, but after a number of users used RTML to put buttons down the left side, we made that the default in the predefined page styles.

Watch your users and let them guide you

There is always a tendency for rich customers to buy expensive solutions, even when cheap solutions are better, because the people offering expensive solutions can spend more to sell them.

Rich customers buy to the ones that could spend a lot of money in marketing

At times we toyed with the idea of a new service called Viaweb Gold. It would have exactly the same features as our regular service, but would cost ten times as much would be sold in person by a man in a suit. We never got around to offering this variant, but I’m sure we could have signed up a few merchants for it.

Viaweb gold. Pay more and get a man in a suit selling you personally

Many software companies, especially at the beginning, have periods where the developers slept under their desks and so on. The alarming thing about web based software is that there is nothing to prevent this becoming the default. The stories about sleeping under desks usually end: then at last we shipped it, and we all went home and slept for a week. Web-based software never ships.

Stress on startups

Desktop software forces users to become system administrators. Web-based software forces programmers to. There is less stress in total, but more for the programmers.

Webapps force programmers to became sysadmins

I don’t mean to disparage Yahoo. They had some good hackers, and the top management were real butt-kickers. For a big company, they were exceptional. But they were still only about a tenth as productive as a small startup. No big company can do much better than that. What’s scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They’re like a mountain that can walk.

Big companies are slow

Seventeenth-century England was much like the third world today, in that government office was a recognized route to wealth. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce.11

Wealth, third world and corruption

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

Lenin walking in a tech company

Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won’t install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.

Would you work harder for the same amount of money?

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I’m not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I’m not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he’ll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I’m saying that he’ll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

What people have to do to get rich, can make your life better

The spammers wouldn’t say these things if they didn’t sound exciting. And “check out the following” is just not going to have nearly the pull with the spam recipient as the kinds of things that spammers say now. Result: if it can’t contain exciting sales pitches, spam becomes less effective as a marketing vehicle, and fewer businesses want to use it.

Spam is sales pitches

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there’s not much going on, and that’s frightening.

Keep it simple and with substance

Jane Austen’s novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself. Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa.

Be suggestive

If anything, you should cultivate dissatisfaction. In Leonardo’s drawings there are often five or six attempts to get a line right. The distinctive back of the Porsche 911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward prototype. In Wright’s early plans for the Guggenheim, the right half was a ziggurat; he inverted it to get the present shape. Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Open source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs.

If anything you sholud cultivate dissatisfaction

I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s no reason not to use it. They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.

Copy a little and create a little

Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, The New Yorker, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc. At any given time there are a few hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them, and it’s nearly impossible to do good work yourself if you’re too far removed from one of these centers. You can push or pull these trends to some extent, but you can’t break away from them.

Good work come from a good hotspot

But the advantage of open source isn’t just that you can fix it when you need to. It’s that everyone can. Open source software is like a paper that has been subject to peer review. Lots of smart people have examined the source code of open source operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD and have already found most of the bugs. Whereas Windows is only as reliable as big-company QA can make it.

Open source has a lot more people doing QA than any big company

The average end user may not need the source code of their word processor, but when you really need reliability, there are solid engineering reasons for insisting on open source.

If you really need reliability then you need the source code and open source

Some hackers prefer the language they’re used to, and dislike anything else. Others say that all languages are the same. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Languages do differ, but it’s hard to say for certain which are best. The field is still evolving.

All the programming languages are the same?

Advocates of static typing argue that it helps to prevent bugs and helps compilers to generate fast code (both true). Advocates of dynamic typing argue that static typing restricts what programs you can write (also true). I prefer dynamic typing. I hate a language that tells me what to do. But some smart people seem to like static typing, so the question must still be an open one.

Programming languages: static vs dynamic

Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel that would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they’re the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.)

SUVs the anti-ecological way to make minivans look more masculine

What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible effort.

A programming language to do the fastest and unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program

Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they’re reusable because they’re language, whether they’re written in an object-oriented style or not.

Object-orientedness doesn't automatically provide reusability

It’s the nature of programming languages to make most people satisfied with whatever they currently use.

People is satisfied with whatever language they use