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I stopped reading the review when I got to the "largely an undocumented process until just recently" line, as well. The best book on DSLs I've ever seen is On Lisp, published in 1993 and available for free from the author. Lisp is almost a meta-DSL - a domain-specific language for the domain of writing domain-specific languages - and this book will get you from "I don't get why the professor is making us write Hello World in Lisp" to thinking in terms of DSLs (and applying that thought process to all programming languages) between its covers.

You can, of course, write DSLs in any language. But you should learn to do so as a matter of writing DSLs instead of as a language-specific technique. How worthwhile is it to read a book about how to make a linked list specifically in Pascal? Learn how to do the thing in a conceptual sense and then use your knowledge of a language to turn the concept into code.

Aren't all the best geniuses?

Exactly. I'm reminded of the following quote from Beating the Averages.

"As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub."

i.e. When a normal or even moderately intelligent person looks at anything a genius does, they see things that are out of the ordinary. Like the hypothetical blub programmer, they see things they don't understand, and those things appear weird to them, even insane. It's different, and therefore eccentric. Well, eccentric is just another word for "deviating from the ordinary". Anyone from moderately intelligent on down has no way to differentiate between an act of superior intelligence and an outright loon.

The only way a non-genius can recognize a genius is through the creation of something that the non-genius can appreciate. e.g. a musical genius creates a song with great hooks, a comic genius makes them laugh harder than anyone else, an engineering genius creates a useful device that no one has thought of before, and that they in turn find useful. A financial genius amasses a hoard of wealth that is obvious to anyone. But everything out of the ordinary that the genius does other than their overt demonstration of genius will appear as nutty to most people, because most people are incapable of understanding the reason for it. And there will be one - pondering things and breaking established convention is just what a genius does.

Exactly. That's what Paul Graham meant when he said Microsoft is Dead. Sure, they've got huge revenues that dwarf those of some third-world countries, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but they're not dangerous. I'm old enough to remember the kind of fear that Microsoft inspired in the hearts of the rest of the software industry fifteen, twenty years ago. Before beginning a software venture they would ask: "What will Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from attempting to enter it and risk competing against them there. Those days are long past, and today the company that has inherited that terrifying aura is Google. This doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing. It simply means that they've turned into a stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP, no longer relevant to the leading edge of the software business.

Of course, they could make a comeback, sort of like a rock star regaining fame after decades of stagnation, or Apple before and after Steve Jobs' return, but I seriously doubt it would happen with a guy like Steve Ballmer at the head. I doubt that even Bill Gates could pull it off were he to return to the helm.

Ideas are cheap, it's execution that matters: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I can assure that these organizations are rife with ideas, bringing the ideas "to market" is the problem.

If you haven't heard of it, the python paradox is an interesting read: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Simply put, the kind of people who learn a language out of interest than out of wanting to get a job tend to be better programmers on average. (This was written awhile ago, when Python had little use outside the FOSS community. Now that Python is looking like it may someday replace Java, perhaps the Haskell Paradox is a better term).

Anyway, perhaps the same issue is at play here. Perhaps the people who use PHP tend to be less aware of security or more apathetic toward it, and thus there is a two way feedback between language and programmer (the last time I used Visual Basic the compiler was as full of holes as a piece of swiss cheese and Microsoft wanted me to pay $100 each to report counterexample bugs, but that was 6.0, back in middle school)

Paul Graham has wrote an brilliant article on this subject http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

• The US Allows Immigration
• The US Is a Rich Country
• The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
• American Universities Are Better.
• You Can Fire People in America.
• In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.
• America Is Not Too Fussy.
• America Has a Large Domestic Market.
• America Has Venture Funding.
• America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers.
• Attitudes
• How To Do Better
• Capital Gains
• Immigration
• A Good Vector

If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like someone digging a ditch. But if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about some new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortingly routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.

In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

Luminaries such as Jamie Zawinski and Richard Stallman work long hours. Richard Stallman worked 70 hours a week creating GCC in the 80s. There is an Arabic saying "If you want to surpass others you have to burn the midnight oil" I suppose that's why their the best.

If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like someone digging a ditch. But if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account. In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about some new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting. To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortingly routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall. In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

Luminaries such as Jamie Zawinski and Richard Stallman work long hours. Richard Stallman worked 70 hours a week creating GCC in the 80s, I suppose that's why their the best.

Paul Graham also writes that it might actually be possible to buy a Silicon Valley, or something very close to it, by investing a billion dollars or so in a city with the right environment that will be conducive to the growth of startups. Perhaps someone in Russia read Graham's article and decided that they had the kind of political will (which Graham says is so unlikely) to pull it off.

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

Personally, I think there need to realistically be three things, in proper order

1. A place people like to live
2. Universities
3. Military and research installations

These three conspire to attract rich people and nerds as the article states. That SUN (Stanford University Network), HP and Google are directly from Stanford, and that Oracle got it's start as a government project are quite good examples.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

That is where your knowledge of history is askew. Steve Wozniak didn't build Apple. He built a computer which Steve Jobs leveraged to build a corporation. Steve Jobs and a group of talented venture capitalists, not to mention dozens of teams of engineers built Apple. Wozniak knows this as well.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

That is where your knowledge of history is askew. Steve Wozniak didn't build Apple. He built a computer which Steve Jobs leveraged to build a corporation. Steve Jobs and a group of talented venture capitalists, not to mention dozens of teams of engineers built Apple. Wozniak knows this as well.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

Apple are the masters of The Submarine and have managed to create yet another self-replicating meme. Love or hate them, you can't deny they know marketing and PR like nobody else.

The good designers did this years ago specifically for standards, not for the iPad. This smells like Gizmodo was hit by The Submarine.

Ah well, in the end I do agree: more use of standards is good, regardless of the underlying cause.

I believe you would be very directly referring to The Submarine. Always a good article to read when this subject comes up.

I think the author is mostly on. He's aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct... if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.

And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I'm learning to enjoy functional programming.

I will say... there was a time when I was probably close to being "ruined." It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn't seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn't seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.

But there was one thing: I'd had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought "Man, this is weird," more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought "this is weird, but interesting." The third year, I thought "Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here."

And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I'm pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.

Because I now think there's either a critical period (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they'll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they'll be interested in what they don't already know, rather than arriving at the point where "they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need."

And if they don't get so exposed, they become Blub programmers, where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don't easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.

To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn't end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn't possibly be the last programming language you'd ever need (if it weren't enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).

The 'pasting not quite compatible libraries together' approach is a Java/COBOL thing of minimizing the damage incompetent consultants can do. I've seen it time and time again - once an Enterprisey Java programmer encounters sufficient complexity...

This is similar to what Paul Graham has said about OOP, but I think he's talking more about Java than say SmallTalk:

Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from doing too much damage. The price is that the resulting code is bloated with protocols and full of duplication. This is not too high a price for big companies, because their software is probably going to be bloated and full of duplication anyway. [emphasis added]

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

Started myself? No; but I've been around it. To reiterate, taxes are pretty low on the list of worries. Here's a description from somebody well known who you might respect. Grepped the essay for "tax". I wasn't surprised that it didn't appear. Not once. Not even as a metaphor for trying situations.

> But most importantly, because that's the law in a huge part of the world, the US included

Ok, so you're saying the existing law already has a double standard and your quibble is with where the boundary the law draws in applying this double standard lies? I can buy that.

That said, I see no inherent issue with being able to patent a clever way of combining mathematical operations to, say, extract a signal from a noisy data stream, if we're ok with being able to patent combining spiky bits and a roller to separate cotton seeds from cotton fibers.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html for some more thoughts on this (I just ran into it when I searched on "patent algorithm", and it eerily echoes exactly what I was saying earlier).

Now there is an important point here: If you're going to have patents, they must be granted for specific inventions, not overbroad descriptions. Patenting "a roller with teeth" would never fly; patenting a roller with teeth being used in a particular way to get a particular effect is a different issue entirely. Similarly, patenting a mathematical technique may or may not make sense depending on what exactly is being patented. This is, sadly, somewhat subjective, but that's inherent in the patent system.

> polluting mathematics in particular and science in general with patents goes against the
> whole concept of collaboration and open share of knowledge.

Does it, though? If I come up with a new way of doing signal processing that has interesting applications, I have two obvious options for monetizing it: keep it a trade secret and start a closed-source company to sell products based on it, or get a patent on the method, which involves sharing the method with others. That's the premise of the patent system, in fact. Perhaps you feel that this is not a good enough argument for patents; I might buy that. But then that's true for all patents, not just algorithm patents (whatever one might want to call them).

This is what hit me too. Apple's A$ certainly does NOT have ARM A9, otherwise they would brag about it. Most likely, the have a single core A8 if even that. After un-spinning "Ars Whatever suggests puts it on par with the iPad's A4" we get A4 is 3 times slower at CPU tasks, at least 4 times slower at video and who knows how many times slower at 3D... Heck, A4 can't even play 780p vs Nvidia's 1080p for the same battery life. I see a blatant deception campaign promoting Apple's inferior product. With measly $1 billion for R&D Apple's does indeed need their $5 billion marketing budget for stealthy PR advertising. Paul Graham described the "technology" here:

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

You make some fair points, but honestly I wish every kid was suffering from the overabundance of love and attention you describe. We still have rampant physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse. The schools we send kids to are a cross between a prison, a sensory deprivation chamber, and (if Paul Graham is to be believed) a corrupt and indolent royal court.
    Parents have less time for them, due mostly to more hours worked, and I suspect we Americans move around a lot more than we did in the past, which is disruptive.

I think that kids are far less useful in our society than kids of previous generations, and they're smart enough to recognize it. They also have less unstructured time, less freedom to roam, and less accessible wilderness than their parents and grandparents did. And don't even get me started on the flood of cheap, trash calories we put in them.

Some kids get over-pampered, and I'm sure it causes real psychological problems. But I don't think that's the primary factor.

Last point: I would point out that the lead author of the study has spent the bulk of her career castigating the youth of today as spoiled, narcissistic whiners. Something about Jean Twinge just triggers my evil detector.

OK, "right" is an opinionated position and YMMV. However, after 48 years of being a programmer, I still find discouragingly few programmers who can design a program beyond the basic forms and business arithmetic or solve problems creatively.

Get him a copy of the "The Little Lisper" or "The Little Schemer", get him a robotics kit like the LEGO system, find him some Turtle application that works interactively on his computer, get him some sort of logic controller kit (like for home automation) and focus on the areas where he has an actual interest. In a couple of years he'll be a better programmer than you are! http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html If you both have a common interest in something like games or graphics, working on a project together builds competence. The free Robotics kit from Microsoft is worth checking out.

BTW, it's interesting how the skills I learned trying to program logic gates (back in the "Tube" era, transitioning to transitors) are now so useful in developing nanotechnology, MEMS, and biologics. See if you can get him interested in the basics. He might even like assembly language because of the high degree of control and obvious cause-and-effect relationships. The transition from Assembly to C was very easy for me.

Good luck.

In programming, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. Imagination is hard to measure, but in practice it dominates the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code.

It's pretty clear that article is a paid shill piece. This essay by Paul Graham explains how things like come to be. Given AT&T's deep pockets, I'm frankly surprised there haven't been more articles like that one.

Personally, after the age of 25 or so, I started to agree more and more with Paul Graham on the subject

Check out this great essay (under the "Money Is Not Wealth" section). About the best explanation I have seen.

While you're at Paul Graham's, the article "The Hundred-Year Language" seems rather pertinent.
Apart from providing that one link, I have nothing more to add to this entire Slashdot story.

Paul Graham wrote a very informative article about "news stories" like this one many years ago. And congrats to the company behind RunRev, it is not that often /. runs slashvertizements for costly commerical software no one has ever heard of.

Paul Graham wrote a very informative article about "news stories" like this one many years ago. And congrats to the company behind RunRev, it is not that often /. runs slashvertizements for costly commerical software no one has ever heard of.

This guy says it best : "So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple continues to maltreat them. [...] Can anything break this cycle? No device I've seen so far could. Palm and RIM haven't a hope. The only credible contender is Android. But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search."

OMG, somebody fire this jerk.

Don't leap to conclusions like that. If he is an old-school C programmer, "macros" may just mean "constants".

If you have C++, you can do

unsigned int CUSTOMER_CODE = 486;

but in boring old C that would be

#define CUSTOMER_CODE 486

Now, if you are talking about something like these then I'm with you. Up against the wall!

Or of course he could be a LISP programmer. Because we all know that macros are what gives LISP its awesome bone-crushing power.

Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)

I had to look that one up. "Never mind!" So now we know.

steveha

From a very smart person, I give you Why Nerds are Unpopular. Short version: because it's unimportant. Smart people are - surprise! - smart enough to figure out what is really important, and it's not social skills or any of the other humdrum that makes up everyday life. Also very succinctly and eloquently paraphrased in this comment.

I'd love to be wrong. But I don't think I am.

Their statement reads like a press release by a company that sees the writing on the wall and is trying to keep stock prices propped up as long as they can. Just saying.

We have a winner. You have just spotted the submarine. Welcome to PR.

according to Paul Graham, Microslop inherited its monopoly from I.B.M.

Yours In Yaznogorsk,
Kilgore T.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Nerds are unpopular because they are pricks. Some of the meanest, most vicious and petty people I have ever met were the ones who were intelligent and well-educated.

Haven't you heard? The suit is back.

Microsoft is dead.

It would be nice this topic thread could be permanently ended.

Yours In Lesosobirsk,
Kilgore T.

dead ( an essay by Paul Graham).

Enjoy.

Yours In Domodedovo,
Kilgore Trout

This has been true for a while, and even before Apple switched to x86; see, for example, Paul Graham's March 2005 essay, The Return of the Mac :

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it's not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker's computer.

A 13" MacBook will fulfill some but not all of the requirements listed by the OP (the major missing one being a dock) for $1,200, and it's relatively easy to virtualize and/or dual boot all three major OSes (Windows, Linux, OS X). What more is there?

If I had something like this, I would call up Paul Graham at Y Combinator... This is the sort of thing he (angel) invests in.

Disclaimer: I don't have a business relationship with those guys. I just find his articles really insightful and interesting. You might too. Start with this one The 18 mistakes that kill startups ... Being a "Single Founder", like yourself, is his first point.

Good luck! I hope you find a lot of success in this

According to Paul Graham, software startups don't need to worry about patents:

We tell the startups we fund not to worry about infringing patents, because startups rarely get sued for patent infringement. There are only two reasons someone might sue you: for money, or to prevent you from competing with them. Startups are too poor to be worth suing for money. And in practice they don't seem to get sued much by competitors, either. They don't get sued by other startups because (a) patent suits are an expensive distraction, and (b) since the other startups are as young as they are, their patents probably haven't issued yet. [3] Nor do startups, at least in the software business, seem to get sued much by established competitors. Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don't know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by winning lawsuits. That's too uncertain. They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels. If you do manage to threaten them, they're more likely to buy you than sue you.

If you think you have a good product, start working in getting it to market. If you get to a point where you're successful enough to be sued for patent infringment, you will have enough resources by then to deal with that situation.

By the way, Paul Graham has many interesting essays about software startups

According to Paul Graham, software startups don't need to worry about patents:

We tell the startups we fund not to worry about infringing patents, because startups rarely get sued for patent infringement. There are only two reasons someone might sue you: for money, or to prevent you from competing with them. Startups are too poor to be worth suing for money. And in practice they don't seem to get sued much by competitors, either. They don't get sued by other startups because (a) patent suits are an expensive distraction, and (b) since the other startups are as young as they are, their patents probably haven't issued yet. [3] Nor do startups, at least in the software business, seem to get sued much by established competitors. Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don't know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by winning lawsuits. That's too uncertain. They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels. If you do manage to threaten them, they're more likely to buy you than sue you.

If you think you have a good product, start working in getting it to market. If you get to a point where you're successful enough to be sued for patent infringment, you will have enough resources by then to deal with that situation.

By the way, Paul Graham has many interesting essays about software startups

I have talked to lawyers about this, and they generally tell you to not worry about patents at the beginning. Basically this is because they'll only sue you because either they want money or they want to shut you down. You don't have enough money to be worth sueing. You also probably aren't taking away enough of anyone's business for them to both with the cost and distraction of launching a lawsuit. What I was told was basically, if I got sued, that meant I was successful because I had enough money to be worth sueing.

However, you should always consult a good intellectual property lawyer.

Some other interesting "facts" - getting a patent generally costs about $15,000. The average return on investment of a patent is (can't quite remember, but) somewhere around $7000 or $9000. Most software companies get them for defensive rather than offensive purposes. The average patent litigation suit in the US is around $1 million. Getting one patent is kind of like being a country and getting one nuclear weapon.

Also, I found this article from Paul Graham insightful.

"The types of problems you can solve is directly related to the quality of abstraction available"

Probably not who you are thinking of, but Paul Graham has said something very similar many, many, many, many times. I suggest reading as much of his writing as you can.

"The types of problems you can solve is directly related to the quality of abstraction available"

Probably not who you are thinking of, but Paul Graham has said something very similar many, many, many, many times. I suggest reading as much of his writing as you can.

"The types of problems you can solve is directly related to the quality of abstraction available"

Probably not who you are thinking of, but Paul Graham has said something very similar many, many, many, many times. I suggest reading as much of his writing as you can.

"The types of problems you can solve is directly related to the quality of abstraction available"

Probably not who you are thinking of, but Paul Graham has said something very similar many, many, many, many times. I suggest reading as much of his writing as you can.