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Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters
larsberg writes "Another wonderful article from Paul Graham on hackers, their lifestyle, and their tools. It's entitled "Hackers and Painters", and provides a great description of how the great hackers write code. The article is definitely worth a read, especially for those who have an inkling that any field that has to place the word "Science" in its name probably isn't really a science after all."
What a great quote. This is so very true.
Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract.
From what I've seen, very few people - espessially those with degress in computer science - share my views on programming. This article takes a different approach to it, but it's the same view I have, when it gets down to it. I usually say that when programming, you shouldn't be bothering with types, memory locations, pointers, and other nonsense that has nothing to do with how the program works. Or in other words, the formal 'scientific' aspects of programming.
Most people will disagree with me here, and I've been involved in many arguments over it. My programing language of choice right now? PHP. Why? Because it sucks less than the other choices. It still boggles my mind that C is used to do any high-level programming (ie, anything besides api's to system calls, and writing drivers and kernels). "But it's so much faster" I hear all the B.Sc's saying. And they're right, it does run faster. It also takes ten times as long to code. And ten times as long to find all the strange bugs and buffer overflows that eventually show up as exploits.
Paul Graham hints at it in his article, but there is no good language right now for writing applications in. PHP in itself is a nice language to write, although it's an interpreted language, not compilied. Perl is a bit too messy for my liking (Paul also mentions this when he says he knows people who wrote perl programs and came back and couldn't understand how they worked), although it is quite powerful. Java is nice in theory, but implemented a bit slowly, and it's a bit too scientific, really -- you spend so much time handling exceptions and making sure all your code is very formal.
So what's the answer? I don't know. But it doesn't exist yet, as far as I know. Until then I'll continue running my slow PHP programs on modern "slow" computers. That run at a mere 1.5 GHz.
Speak before you think
Paul Graham is a smart guy. He made millions selling his company to Yahoo. He's written several books on Lisp. He regularly has speaking engagements. And he does practice what he preaches, actually using high level languages rather just bashing away at C++, but still using it for everything, like most people do. He also manages to completely stay away from the usual topics, like Linux vs. Windows. Oh, all right, one more "and": And he has some unpopular opinions, like that of OOP being overrated smoke and mirrors.
That said, his view of what it means to hack is certainly different than what it usually means in geek circles. Actually, I should go further than that: Paul Graham isn't even a geek. Nobody would call Feynman or Dyson a geek, would they? Paul Graham is someone of high intelligence who happens to be applying that intelligence to computer programming (and writing, and speaking, and painting). This is much different from the typical hacker who pounds out C code because he has nothing better to do and revels in the geek traditions of arguing about Linux distributions, Star Trek movies, and yes, posting to Slashdot. In short, Paul Graham is a geek by association, because of what he decided he likes to do, whereas most hackers revel in their own geekiness, pointless and inbred though it may be.