Paul Graham "Hackers and Painters" | 20220607

Abstract: Similarities between hackers and painters, thoughts on entrepreneurship and software design.

Chapter 2 · Hackers and Painters#

Like composers, architects, and writers, hackers and painters are trying to create excellent works. They are not fundamentally doing research, although they may discover new techniques in the process of creation.

After years of baptism, beautiful things have a greater chance of survival and development, while ugly things are often eliminated. Unfortunately, this assessment takes time, which may be longer than a person's lifetime.
Samuel Johnson once said that it takes 100 years to reach a consensus on the evaluation of a writer. You have to wait for his influential friends to die first, and then wait for his followers to die before you can have a fair evaluation of him.

It is difficult for you (entrepreneurs) to directly confront the opponent (big companies) face to face and fight with bare hands, for example, even if it is not difficult to write a word processing software better than Microsoft Word, but Microsoft has its own castle, its operating system is a monopoly, and you cannot pose a threat to it at all, it won't even notice your existence.
The real battlefield for competing in software design is the market in emerging fields, where no one has established defenses.

All creators face this problem: the demand for fun software is not comparable to the demand for software that solves customer problems. The remuneration for performing in a small theater is not comparable to the remuneration for wearing a cartoon gorilla costume and standing for manufacturers at an exhibition. The return on writing novels is not comparable to the return on writing advertising copy. The income from developing programming languages is not comparable to the income from connecting databases that some companies have abandoned to servers.

Almost all creators have a "day job" in the early stages of their careers. Painters and writers are particularly notable. If you are lucky, you can find a "day job" that is closely related to your "real work". Musicians often seem to work in record stores. Similarly, hackers who study a certain programming language or operating system are likely to get a "day job" using these tools, and then develop beautiful software in their spare time.

In order to write excellent software, you must assume that users are basically ignorant of your software. You need to understand that when users use your software for the first time, they will not do their homework in advance and start using it without any preparation. Therefore, it is best for the usage of the software to conform to the user's intuition. Don't expect users to read the manual.

The necessity for hackers to understand "computational theory" is similar to the necessity for painters to understand the chemical composition of pigments.
All those invisible details merged together, creating astonishing effects, as if thousands of subtle sounds were singing in the same tone.
If hackers are just technical workers responsible for implementing the will of the leaders, their responsibilities are no different from those of ditch diggers. They just dig from one end to the other, that's all.
A page filled with mathematical formulas is really impressive. Pro tip: Using the Greek alphabet to represent variable names will leave a deeper impression.