paul graham quotes

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
The Word "Hacker" - http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

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

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" (Advice for High School Kids)
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html#fb10

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
The Word "Hacker" - http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

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 - "The Hundred-Year Language"
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

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
"Great Hackers" (later edited out) - http://xrl.us/ho9c

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
"Java's Cover" - http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

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

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
The Word "Hacker" - http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

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

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
"Java's Cover" - http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

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
"Hackers and Painters" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

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 / "Being Popular" - http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

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
"Hackers and Painters" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

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 - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

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
Java's Cover - http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

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
Java's Cover - http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

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 - http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

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
"Being Popular" - http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

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
How to Start a Startup - http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

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
"The Hundred-Year Language" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

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
"What You'll Wish You'd Known" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

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
Java's Cover - http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

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