Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

There is one thing more important than succinctness to a hacker: being able to do what you want. In the history of programming languages, a surprising amount of effort has gone into preventing programmers from doing things considered to be improper.

There are two ways new technology gets introduced: the organic growth method, and the big bang method. The organic growth method is exemplified by the classic seat-of-the-pants underfunded garage startup.

The other approach, the big bang method, is exemplified by the VC-backed, heavily marketed startup. They rush to develop a product, launch it with great publicity, and immediately (they hope) have a large user base.

By way of summary, let’s try describing the hacker’s dream language. The dream language is clean and terse. It has an interactive top level that starts up fast. You can write programs to solve common problems with very little code. Nearly all the code in any program you write is code that’s specific to your application. Everything else has been done for you. The syntax of the language is brief to a fault. You never have to type an unnecessary character, or even use the Shift key much. Using big abstractions you can write the first version of a program very quickly. Later, when you want to optimize, there’s a really good profiler that tells you where to focus your attention. You can make inner loops blindingly fast, even writing inline byte code if you need to.

Over in the arts, things are different. Design is all about people. The human body is a strange thing, but when you’re designing a chair, that’s what you’re designing for, and there’s no way around it.

All the arts have to pander to the interests and limitations of humans.

So how do you fix schools? The key to the answer may be college. When you go to (a good) college, most of the problems I describe get fixed. So the solution may come from asking, how do you make life for teenage nerds more like college life? Home-schooling offers an immediate solution, but it probably isn’t the optimal one. Why don’t parents home-school their kids all the way through college? Because college offers opportunities home-schooling can’t duplicate? So could high school if it were done right.

Many organizations obligingly publish lists of what you can’t say within them. Unfortunately these lists are usually both incomplete, because there are things so shocking they don’t even anticipate anyone saying them, and at the same time so general that they couldn’t possibly be enforced literally. It’s a rare university speech code that would not, taken literally, forbid Shakespeare.