Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
So, if hacking works like painting and writing, is it as cool? After all, you only get one life. You might as well spend it working on something great.
Unfortunately, the question is hard to answer. There is always a big time lag in prestige. It's like light from a distant star. Painting has prestige now because of great work people did five hundred years ago. At the time, no one thought these paintings were as important as we do today. It would have seemed very odd to people at the time that Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, would one day be known mostly as the guy with the strange nose in a painting by Piero della Francesca.
So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool as painting now, we should remember that painting itself didn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.
What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel.
Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now.
Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium.
Notes[1] The greatest damage that photography has done to painting may be the fact that it killed the best day job. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.
[2] I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even in their spare time. But so many of the best hackers work on open-source projects now that the main effect of this policy may be to ensure that they won't be able to hire any first-rate programmers.
[3] What you learn about programming in college is much like what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in high school.
[4] Here's an example of applied empathy. At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would our competitors hate most? At one point a competitor added a feature to their software that was basically useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they made much of it in the trade press. We could have tried to explain that the feature was useless, but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon.
[5] Except text editors and compilers. Hackers don't need empathy to design these, because they are themselves typical users.
[6] Well, almost. They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but this could be fixed within a few months by buying an additional disk drive.
[7] The way to make programs easy to read is not to stuff them with comments. I would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step further. Programming languages should be designed to express algorithms, and only incidentally to tell computers how to execute them. A good programming language ought to be better for explaining software than English. You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this, and to Henry Leitner and Larry Finkelstein for inviting me to speak.
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