Paul Graham On 'Great Hackers'

dcgrigsby writes "Always interesting, if not unbiased, Paul Graham has published a new article on 'Great Hackers', discussing why Perl and Python are apparently better than Java, on why Microsoft developers get offices, and a host of other sure-to-be-controversial stuff."

Comments

You forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

It is GNU/Great Hackers.

Re:Article text (in case of slashdotting)

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't mean to make the book controversial. Think about your breathing. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book.

AIIEE! Make it stop! Teh uber troll is killing my mind! I cant stop thinking about my breathing!

Re:Astrology for Geeks

[Chris Z. Wintrowski]

...Every time I read a Graham article, I feel dirty at the amount of false modesty and self-congratulation involved. He's like a digital Stuart Smalley.

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.

Re:All hackers are "great"

[tesmako]

Also;

Linking bad code against a great hackers code will crush the bugs out of existance.

The code will over time improve upon itself to remain competitive with any future innovations. Only the code of another great hacker can keep a great hackers code at bay.

A great hackers code will run correctly on any machine, real or virtual, even overcoming machines that are not Turing-complete.

The ground on which a great hacker has walked cannot be crossed by evil being of shadow, making it important to keep the engineering facilities far from marketing and accounting.

Eating the ashes of a print-out of a great hackers code will cure cancer, tooth rot and the common cold.

Great hackers all go to heaven and get the good rooms near the elevator to the bar. Unfortunately they dont dare visit the bar during open hours due to social incompetence.