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yes the Japanese games are different but there is a good reason. Firstly the system is not capable of running a full blown title as per PS2. So the designers are really forced to rethink their game style (and do they think) to fit the limitations of the hardware format. Take for instance konami with MG. They release MG but not *solid*, but Acid. Same franchise, different game style (with a card twist).

Konami already make a slew of GBA games so they pretty well unersand their market. Its a different market to PS/XB.

Remember Digimon , small animals, monsters fighting, computers and CARDS ... it's a bit like a digital D&D for those old enough /young enough to remember. All appeal to a very specific market.

After attending a ACMI game time symposium in Melbourne this year I had the chance to hear/see Tetsuya Mizuguchi [gamespot interview] ). He talked for about an hour about game design and a bit about some upcoming titles for PSP. I now understand a bit more about *Japanese* game style and take my hat off to true innovators. No cheesy ports of your [insert your top 10 title here] PS2, PC games here. All *new* original ideas.

For the first releases the games are squarely aimed at *kids* and certainly those with a sense for Japanse style (manga, pokemon, digimon, cards, et.-al.) and good taste (read the paul graham article, taste to understand what I mean).I already have a 6 year old drooling over my shoulder wondering how to get one of these.

You miss an entire category of languages that achieve the aims of 4th gen langauges by allowing the programmer to easily create a domain specific language in what you might term a 3rd gen language. Then domain problems find natural expression in a newly created language just for that domain.

In order to do this, we need a powerful macro system - not just the simple textual substitution of C's preprocessor. The whole lisp family of languages have this sort of powerful macro system, and this is why the lisp family of languages is significanly more expressive and powerful than typical 3rd gen languages like C.

Is there a response from the US governemnt? I would not be surprised if the two "Agents" that walked into this backwater village store were just two teen age pranksters. The rubics cube even sounds suspicious enough to match up with the authority defying hacker persona (http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html).

No, it's a freedom of religion issue. She prayed that God do something for her.

You know you live in a police state when you are "Shaken Down" by the Praetorian Guards for praying.

I'll say this about The President:
We deserve what we got. The republican party and the democratic party just feed us their little prepackaged presidential candidates and we blithingly "choose" between the two most corrupt and ass-kissing people in the country.

As The Governor of California said: "Girlie-men." (taken out of context, of course)

Read Paul Graham's What You can't say.

And you, annie, enjoy the ride.

From the article:

It's a little like locking a house: if you try to make the locking system as unobtrusive and inconspicuous as possible, somebody will test to see if it works, but if the system appears extremely difficult to break down as soon as you look at it, anyone with evil intentions will probably admit that it's not even worth trying to break in there.

This is exactly the opposite of Paul Graham's attitude expressed in the Good Bad Attitude mentioned on Slashdot recently:

Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is how to pick it.

I make it no secret that I sleep with my apartment door unlocked. Nobody has ever "tested" my door, despite the facts that I'm likely asleep and there's likely expensive stuff inside. However, were I to install a large array of deadbolts positioned very visibly on the outside of my door, I feel I'd likely have somebody stare at them for a while, wondering just how to get at what's on the other side.

I agree with Paul Graham to a much greater extent than Hannu H. Kari.

What you say might be true about his last few essays (those published after "Hackers and Painters" hit the shelves). However, some of the earlier ones (Why Nerds are Unpopular or What You Can't Say) are really very interesting.

What you say might be true about his last few essays (those published after "Hackers and Painters" hit the shelves). However, some of the earlier ones (Why Nerds are Unpopular or What You Can't Say) are really very interesting.

Good Bad Attitude

(This is one of the essays from Hackers & Painters that was not till now online.)

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).

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.

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 newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

This attitude is sometimes affected. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter. The fake version is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation.

But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win. I wish its advantages were better understood.

For example, I suspect people in Hollywood are simply mystified by hackers' attitudes toward copyrights. They are a perennial topic of heated discussion on Slashdot. But why should people who program computers be so concerned about copyrights, of all things?

Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent copying. Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is how to pick it. But there is a deeper reason that hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents. They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect "intellectual property" as a threat to the intellectual freedom they need to do their job. And they are right.

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.

In 1977 there was no doubt some group within IBM developing what they expected to be the next generation of busin

Choice quote: "(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm."

I sense an approaching bad essay.

Yeah, sure it is turing complete. It also has a self -hosted interpreter, that's of course always a sign of a rather mature language.
You seem to be stuck in the Turing Trap. That can easily lead to another verification of Greenspuns 10th Rule of Programming. Try to find out how to beat the averages, please.

The key to keeping a job is to get off the well worn path of C/Java/Perl/Python and develop specialized skills that won't be so easily duplicated by the programmer factories. Learn to use high performance Common Lisp systems for example.
(see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html for a Lisp case study).

Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.

It may not be a good plan to hope to do "something you really like" after many years of minimum effort, but it does work to do SYRL after a few years of maximum effort. At least, it worked for me.

I talked a little bit about this in Great Hackers, and much more extensively in "How to Create Wealth," which is probably the most subversive of the essays in Hackers & Painters.

Paul Graham wrote an article on the subject, titled Why Nerds Are Unpopular. I find his essay a lot more believable and relevant than this conspiracy-theory-laden underground history mumbo-jumbo (disclaimer: I've read only about 50% of the book, skimmed the rest).

There's a difference between reading/studying the works and and assigning rote analysis of minutia in those readings. In other words, one can read "The Merchant of Venice" to get an example of the differing practices of Christians and Jews, what anti-semitism looks like, and how others deal with issues related to vengeance. On the other hand, writing an essay on whether or not Shylock was justified in his actions usually only serves to bore the student into hatred of Shakespeare. At the very least, it does little to enhance writing skills except perhaps in the persuasive form (which is covered in the essay). In addition, only in its most rarefied form could an essay legitimately compare the life experiences of the characters in MoV to our lives today.

Studying biology in college allows one to work in fields related to biology. Studying literature today usually just prepares you for work analyzing pre- and early modern literary works. Much else a lit graduate takes to the working world is largely not given by the college but rather the fruits of personal initiative and curiousity.

Ask someone with a degree in literature what they do for a living and I'm sure they will respond with something drastically different than "discussing Captain Ahab as a Christ figure."

And if your thought is that this analyis is teaching students to think, you obviously haven't met a large number of students in the humanities today. The author of the essay about essays said it well in his essay "What You Can't Say": "...most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics."

In a follow-up article, he will claim that, "Python programmers write better essays than Java programmers".

He says:

... they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

This is more the way I viewed school. It never occurred to me that this is in fact the way it was designed from the start. In retrospect though, it makes perfect sense.

Read Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular and tell me if this article suddenly sounds familiar.

I think that the "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" essay by Paul Graham would also be appropriate here. Some people do try to learn and improve themselves, while others simply don't care or only want their piece of paper.

I hope some of you had a better experience, even within the institution. I know it can be done in many locations with the proper familial and professional guidance. I hope someday the system can be rebooted to its innate purpose, but that's virtually impossible without first totally dismantling it.

people just concentrate on the best tool for the job instead of worrying about things like, "coolness".

He's never claimed that there's one best tool -- after all, he ended up talking about Python, when his personal love goes to Lisp. His point was that for some people there's more to it than the job (and these people tend not to choose Java).

Is that really true? In many fields there are tools that only experts can use properly. Why should it be different in programming? I think Michael Vanier makes a good point about LFSPs.

In particular, Graham claims that terser languages are more powerful, because studies have shown that coders churn out a pretty constant number of lines per day, regardless of the programming language. Java is anything but terse.

That is an insightful essay, but I disagree with a few of Graham's assumptions. For instance:

I think a better measure of the size of a program would be the number of elements, where an element is anything that would be a distinct node if you drew a tree representing the source code. The name of a variable or function is an element; an integer or a floating-point number is an element; a segment of literal text is an element; an element of a pattern, or a format directive, is an element; a new block is an element. There are borderline cases (is -5 two elements or one?) but I think most of them are the same for every language, so they don't affect comparisons much.

I think that this isn't broad enough. Whenever I read an novel or something, I tend to parse the text in discrete blocks. As a programmer, I tend to do the same with source code. It is almost trivial to convert any small code block between any language (normalized for one's familiarity with the language's syntax, of course).

However, the really hard part about programming - the part that requires skill - is understanding what small blocks of code to write and how to connect them together. Languages, which have features that help identify the relationship between code blocks, are easier to read. And I'm more productive in languages where it is easy to reconcile the ever-chaning model in my head with the code on the screen.

So instead of measuring terseness in code-elements, I perfer to use "natural" code-blocks built into each language. It doesn't really matter how many elements are required to implement a loop. In fact, I usually write code with "idiot-proof" variable names and verbose comments (though balanced with convenience). IOW documenting as I write. However, support for tying code blocks together - i.e. functions, objects, classes, prototypes, aspects, iterators, templates, and others chunks of code - is the real power of a language.

I do understand why Java is successful. It's designed for use by armies of mediocre programmers, and that's what the corporate world wants. If you're a really talented programmer, you're probably going to prefer a language designed for you. Since great programmers are less common than mediocre ones, that language will be less popular.

If you don't understand why a lot of great programmers like Lisp, maybe that's your fault. Go read about the Blub paradox.

Paul Graham points out why this happens in another of his essays, Revenge of the Nerds.

The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.

Suppose, for example, you need to write a piece of software. The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in. Exactly. He thinks you should write it in Java.

Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.

Well, this doesn't sound that unreasonable. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that assumption turns out to be false. The pointy-haired boss believes that all programming languages are pretty much equivalent. If that were true, he would be right on target. If languages are all equivalent, sure, use whatever language everyone else is using.

Nor did the people who voted you up.

For your reference, here is his Great Hackers article.

Try to find his attempts to compare Java to languages which don't offer the protections that you talk about in Java. You'll fail. C and C++ don't even get a mention. The languages that he cites as cooler than Java are languages like Perl and Python, which have bounds checking. If you read other articles, you'll find that Paul Graham also is a big fan of Common Lisp. Which has had full memory management from day 1. (In fact I believe that the Lisp family of languages invented memory management!)

So feel free to cut the knee-jerk response and actually read the criticism before saying anything more. You might learn something, like the fact that overly verbose languages impose real development speed costs on you. A fact that has been known since the early 70's, even though it may be news to you.

It's clear Graham got the cart before the horse in his Great Hackers essay.

He should have led that essay with this quote from "Succinctness is Power":

"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."

- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

He should have reiterated that point again in the middle of the GH essay and he should have ended with it.

It's clear Graham got the cart before the horse in his Great Hackers essay.

He should have led that essay with this quote from "Succinctness is Power":

"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."

- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

He should have reiterated that point again in the middle of the GH essay and he should have ended with it.

I'm not sure the article author has actually read the Paul Graham essay that he is responding to.
He almost entirely fails to discuss any of the attributes that Graham assigns to languages that 'Great Hackers' like to use.
In particular, Graham claims that terser languages are more powerful, because studies have shown that coders churn out a pretty constant number of lines per day, regardless of the programming language. Java is anything but terse.
I could go on, particularly since the Sun JVM isn't open source, and Graham makes a point of claiming that Great Hackers prefer to use open source tools. I think frantic defensive articles regarding Java aren't helping anyone. The managers that choose Java don't read Paul Graham articles, and I doubt Paul Graham much cares what a Java-oriented business journal has to say about his articles. Please note that I am just relating the opinions that Graham has put on his website. I do not necessarily share his views.

Maybe this comes as a surprise, but most teachers take their jobs seriously and don't assign tasks to pupils on a whim. If they want you to learn something, there is usually a reason for it.

Teachers aren't the ones who decide which classes will be required. I'm willing to accept that my teachers in high school knew what was required to "know English" better than I did, but not that some suit knew which classes I should take better than I did.

And yeah, there's a reason for requiring so many classes - to segregate kids from the rest of society. That's what mandatory schooling is all about.

As Paul Graham wrote, "Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend. [...] Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them. If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there."

• CLiki, the Common Lisp Wiki
• Paul Graham's articles about Lisp
• Paul Graham's book, On Lisp
• The Emacs Wiki

• CLiki, the Common Lisp Wiki
• Paul Graham's articles about Lisp
• Paul Graham's book, On Lisp
• The Emacs Wiki

Your message seems to be lacking a point. It suggests being critical of sources in a vague and general way, but has no specifics about the current story.

Are you suggesting that we dismiss this merely because it appears on the web? That's not "sophistication", that's just falling prey to the same fallacy, only in reverse! The reality is that the "web" status is a null factor.

Paul Graham's qualifications are freely available online. While you of course can't therefore accept everything he says uncritically, he isn't even a good example of "some guy with a blog saying things". He's been around for decades, doing real work, writing books on complicated subjects, and while I can't know for sure, if I had to lay money, the odds favor him being much more experienced than you. (Which is to say, his comments can have the type of value you seem to desire, not that they must. I personally largely agree with him but there are plenty of people with equal or more experience I do not agree with, some of them very highly respected; as a concrete "for instance" I don't agree with anybody who believes that only static type checking by the compiler can produce quality software. That's a lot of very big names.)

Similarly, this author's qualifications are freely available online. While I'm not sure I'd trust him to evaluate why Java is doing well, or to evaluate it from a technical standpoint, he seems to me to be in a very good position to evaluate how the industry interest in Java is faring, certainly much better than my position. (On the other hand, the incompetent use of a "Google-fight" is disconcerting; again, I'm not advocating blind acceptance or rejection.)

You don't directly say "This can be dismissed because it is on the web", but you sure seem to strongly imply it. Did you not finish your post before you hit "Submit", or are you really advocating falling into the exact same fallacy you think you are warning against?

Ah but you see Paul Graham at least practices what he preaches. He has written at length about why programming languages vary in power and why leveraging that power can really make a difference - no matter what pointed haired bosses think.

If some of the development community's best and brightest think this language is superior, why not drive an effort to help it put food on the table rather than relegate it to a tool that helps you write scripts to rotate witty quotes in your .plan file?

Python puts food on the table for me - and quite a lot of it too. My clients so far haven't cared what language their systems (some very large systems I might add) are written in - just that they work, are reliable, easy to maintain and took a surprisingly short time to write.

Pardon me while I go build a better mouse trap, pontificate on how much better it is and what a great mouse catcher I am, and then put it in my hamster's cage to prove it.

You do that. In the mean time many of us will continue to enjoy Graham's essays. I may not always agree with him but he's not just some theoretical pontificator - he founded ViaWeb and made it the leader in virtual shopfront building solutions by using the power of Lisp (hardly a mainstream commercial development language) and then sold it to Yahoo for several million dollars.

Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.

Unless you're just hacking in your basement and get paid whether you deliver or not - like Paul Graham.

Paul Graham wrote the software that is now Yahoo! Store: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

• How do you create anonymous functions and pass them as variables in Python? You can't, only "lambda *expressions*" which is a strange and arbitrary distinction.

repeat after me, "python documentation is my best fiend ... ".

You can read all about lambda expressions in the Tutorial section, 4.7.5 Lambda Forms. They have been around at least since '99. In fact if I dig out my trusty copy of Learning Python, Mark Lutz, 1st Ed., 1999, Oreilly Press, I find that if I turn to page 111 - 113 I can read that:

... Python also provides an expresson form that generates function objects. Because of it's similarity to a tool in the LISP Language. It's called lambda. It's general form is the keyword lambda, followed by one or more arguments, followed by an expression after a colon:

• lambda argument 1, argument N : expression using argument

So python does have lambda expression capability. However you maybe making a point similiar to PG in that Python is not as useful as Lisp as outlined in Beating the Averages and Sussinctness is power.

• How do you create anonymous functions and pass them as variables in Python? You can't, only "lambda *expressions*" which is a strange and arbitrary distinction.

repeat after me, "python documentation is my best fiend ... ".

You can read all about lambda expressions in the Tutorial section, 4.7.5 Lambda Forms. They have been around at least since '99. In fact if I dig out my trusty copy of Learning Python, Mark Lutz, 1st Ed., 1999, Oreilly Press, I find that if I turn to page 111 - 113 I can read that:

... Python also provides an expresson form that generates function objects. Because of it's similarity to a tool in the LISP Language. It's called lambda. It's general form is the keyword lambda, followed by one or more arguments, followed by an expression after a colon:

• lambda argument 1, argument N : expression using argument

So python does have lambda expression capability. However you maybe making a point similiar to PG in that Python is not as useful as Lisp as outlined in Beating the Averages and Sussinctness is power.

From http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html :

I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it ...

Do I need to add more?

Did you notice that he already wrote an article on why Lisp hasn't gained acceptance in commercial software development circles: If Lisp Is So Great
An article about Python would probably look very similar - although the "frightening syntax" argument wouldn't be valid in this case.

He writes the kind of insightful programmer's stuff, a la Joel on Software.

I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that.

This is the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss doesn't even want to think about. And so most of them don't. Because, you know, when it comes down to it, the pointy-haired boss doesn't mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it's his fault. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd.

Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is "industry best practice." Its purpose is to shield the pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is "industry best practice," and the company loses, he can't be blamed. He didn't choose, the industry did.

I believe this term was originally used to describe accounting methods and so on. What it means, roughly, is don't do anything weird. And in accounting that's probably a good idea. The terms "cutting-edge" and "accounting" do not sound good together. But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the wrong answers.

(under the section "A Recipe")

Mind you, that kind of criterion is probably still quite valid in decisions about database technology - Graham was mainly discussing programming language technology in the aforementioned article.

But still, it's an interesting (albeit depressing) perspective - that the highest priority for a boss (whether pointy-haired or not) is to avoid blame for failure; not necessarily to avoid failure itself *wry grin*.

(BTW: I have no dispute whatsoever with your first point :-))

Good point about reading a specific blog topic. There are a few people of whoom I read their articles (read:blog) regularly, but in general I could care less about blogs.

I have made it a goal in my blog to actually write about relevant, or new information, code tips, projects, etc.... and not just random thoughts

A few good guides for having a focused blog are : Paul Graham, Engadget and Brandon Purcell. Ok Pual's site is not really a blog, but a collection of articles.. but whats the diff? Those are the best types of blogs!

He is the super-hacker that is 100x more productive than others that Paul Graham keeps writing about.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Am I the only one, who after reading the doubleclick DoS article here found that their usage of the term 'hackers' was really rather....stupid? Something to that point? After reading the Great Hackers article, anyways... Surely I can't be the only one who was bugged by this.

Don't you think it's absurd how Paul Graham spends all his time writing about hackers, programming languages, and how to write code, without actually writing any code himself?

Since the two lisp books and Viaweb, the man has written absolutely nothing in the way of code (aside from some very simple Bayesian spam filter snippets, and this vapour-ware programming language 'Arc' he's apparently designing). Instead, he's devoted himself to writing geek fluff articles, and cultivating this stupid geek superhero stereotype mythos wherein rogue computer nerds use their super coding powers to save the world by thinking "forbidden thoughts". It's just so lame, like a bad episode of Star Trek Voyager where the crew pull their way out of a few scrapes, and then give themselves the old self-congratulatory Federation reach-around for a job well done (which is usually either violating the Prime Directive by interfering with another civilisation and imposing "human morality" upon them, or finding some inter-dimensional time-travelling phenomenon that allows them to circumvent certain doom, a.k.a. the infamous Rick Berman and Brannon Braga reset button).

Here's a message for Paul Graham: real hackers write code - they don't sit on their arses writing about writing code. They also don't spend their time entertaining stupidities such as the promotion of heretical thinking just because they want to justify their own arrogant, selfish, and ill-considered bastardisation of the one true faith. You are a myth. The Paul Graham uber-hacker of internet fame no longer exists. What happened to him, I really can't say - maybe Viaweb burnt him out, and he's now wandering the streets of Cambridge in a daze, muttering to himself some confused fantasy that it was all Robert Morris's fault, and Trevor Blackwell was really a Communist infiltrator from the north who had been mailing code to the Russians. Who knows! But the reality is clear: the Paul Graham that runs paulgraham.com is no more of a hacker than Barney the dinosaur.

Don't you think it's absurd how Paul Graham spends all his time writing about hackers, programming languages, and how to write code, without actually writing any code himself?

Since the two lisp books and Viaweb, the man has written absolutely nothing in the way of code (aside from some very simple Bayesian spam filter snippets, and this vapour-ware programming language 'Arc' he's apparently designing). Instead, he's devoted himself to writing geek fluff articles, and cultivating this stupid geek superhero stereotype mythos wherein rogue computer nerds use their super coding powers to save the world by thinking "forbidden thoughts". It's just so lame, like a bad episode of Star Trek Voyager where the crew pull their way out of a few scrapes, and then give themselves the old self-congratulatory Federation reach-around for a job well done (which is usually either violating the Prime Directive by interfering with another civilisation and imposing "human morality" upon them, or finding some inter-dimensional time-travelling phenomenon that allows them to circumvent certain doom, a.k.a. the infamous Rick Berman and Brannon Braga reset button).

Here's a message for Paul Graham: real hackers write code - they don't sit on their arses writing about writing code. They also don't spend their time entertaining stupidities such as the promotion of heretical thinking just because they want to justify their own arrogant, selfish, and ill-considered bastardisation of the one true faith. You are a myth. The Paul Graham uber-hacker of internet fame no longer exists. What happened to him, I really can't say - maybe Viaweb burnt him out, and he's now wandering the streets of Cambridge in a daze, muttering to himself some confused fantasy that it was all Robert Morris's fault, and Trevor Blackwell was really a Communist infiltrator from the north who had been mailing code to the Russians. Who knows! But the reality is clear: the Paul Graham that runs paulgraham.com is no more of a hacker than Barney the dinosaur.

shrug

Maybe he's right, but I doubt it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

Maybe Paul can tell you why. The following is from his General FAQ
"Why is the text on your site so narrow? It wastes screen space.
The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is legibility. Text is most legible with at most 60-70 characters per line. On computer screens, you don't want to go much over 60."