Hackers & Painters 112
| Hackers & Painters | |
| author | Paul Graham |
| pages | 271 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Media |
| rating | 8 - May not interest absolutely everyone |
| reviewer | Tony Williams |
| ISBN | 0596006624 |
| summary | Interesting collection of essays, mainly concerned with software |
Literature has a long history of the essayist; since those famous theses on the church door at Wittgenstein a well written and thought provoking essay on a topic has provided power and focus for important discussions. Graham has either learnt or discovered the important points in writing a good essay; brevity, quality writing and thought.
In this volume Graham covers a range of topics, though all are, understandably, centered on computers. Why nerds are unpopular at school, and what this demonstrates about our eduction system; why program in Lisp; the importance of "startups", programming languages and web development are all touched on. At the same time he covers topics less techno-centric such as heretical thinking and speech. wealth creation and unequal income distribution.
I found myself disagreeing with him often while reading the book, though every time I did I found his argument compelling. I agree with Andy Hertzfeld, quoted on the back cover of the book, "He may even make you want to start programming in Lisp." Graham is politically more conservative and right wing than me, he is also a fervent supporter of Lisp, while I'm a C and Perl advocate. It is telling that at no time did I find myself railing at his views, rather I was reading his arguments and giving them meme space. A good sign of a writer that does not indulge in unnecessary or extreme polemic.
Graham also tends to concentrate on a single point in each essay, allowing for both good coverage and a brief essay. Where he covers a larger context, such as high school education in "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" that opens the book, he seems to focus on just one or two good points of discussion.
The title essay is the second in the collection and provides an interesting look at hacking and some lessons we can learn by analogy to the work and life of Rennaissance painters, particularly in how it is done and how it can be funded. The third, "What You Can't Say" is social commentary on heretical thinking. Four, "Good Bad Attitude" is on the benefits of breaking rules, both in life and hacking. Five, "The Other Road Ahead", is an excellent look at web based software and why it offers benefits to both user and developer with Graham examining some lessons he learnt while building ViaWeb. Six, "How To Make Wealth", is a look at becoming wealthy and how a 'startup' might be the best way to do it. The seventh, "Mind The Gap", is an argument that we should not worry so much about 'unequal wealth distribution' and why it might actually be a good thing. From this list, and a look at the table of contents (available as a PDF on the O'Reilly page for the book), you can see that Graham covers a wide spectrum while never straying from topics he knows.
If I was forced to identify a weakness in this book it may well be that Graham does not evince doubt or uncertainty in his arguments, on a few occasions he may admit to a narrow view or knowledge but doubt or uncertainty don't seem to enter his field of vision while he writes. This coupled with a single viewpoint makes the book less than all-encompassing in discussion. However, I must admit that it is almost impossible to be anything more with a single author and Graham may well be more honest than others who pick and choose the alternatives they present.
Most of the essays are available at Graham's website, but frankly I am a fan of dead trees and appreciated that this book could be read on the bus or in bed. If you would prefer something you cna read on the bus then a PDF of the second chapter, "Hackers & Painters" is available from the O'Reilly page linked above.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to think about a number of topics important to the culture of our tiny corner of the world, computers and the net, while not ignoring the rest.
You can purchase Hackers & Painters from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Wittgenstein? (Score:5, Informative)
Wittgenstein? (Score:5, Informative)
Being Jewish, I don't claim to have the last word on this subject but wasn't it Wittenberg? Wittgenstein certainly doesn't sound right -- perhaps you're thinking of the philosopher (also Jewish, more or less)?
Anyway, regarding the book: Some of those essays have been linked here. Good for sparking a few hours of argument, but they seem much more suited to a website than to a 200 page bound volume.
Paul Graham links mentioned above all in one place (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:4, Informative)
Many libertarians, like myself, came to the philosophy from the right side of politics: a belief in strong economic liberty as the best (and only ethical) policy led to a belief in strong social liberty. I personally still identify as "right wing," and "conservative," although the more libertarian I become the more problems I have with those I formerly identified as "my side."
Meanwhile, many libertarians came to the philosophy from the left side of politics, and I presume ESR is probably one of them: a belief in strong social liberty led to a belief in strong economic liberty. I was shocked when I started reading libertarian forums and discovered these people even existed; it seemed so wrong to me that there were people who thought legalizing drugs was more important than deregulating industries. But they are out there, and they do not appreciate being identified as right wing.
And in the end us "right-wing libertarians" and those "left-wing libertarians" are far more similar to each other than to any other group. Some of us are still having trouble wrapping our brains around the beliefs further from where we started, but for the most part, we all agree. Thus libertarianism is a different animal from the right wing, left wing spectrum. You might google for the "world's smallest political quiz," which is less useful as a quiz and more useful as a graph to show how libertarians envision the political "spectrum."
Incidentally, it was the very ESR you replied to who was mostly responsible for my shift from conservative, laissez-faire capitalist to anarcho-libertarian.
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:1, Informative)
> Nice try, but (and I suspect many others) libertarians are definately on the
> right end of that spectrum you try to wash yourself of
This is just false by any but the most abused (and ultimately meaningless) definitions of the terms. The right and left wings are used, at most, to define two basic axes:
1) authoritarian (anarchism----totalitarianism)
2) moral (progressive-----traditionalist)
One can still be a progressively-minded libertarian or an anarcho-libertarian - neither of those examples is conservative or right-wing.
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:3, Informative)
The Democrats association with the civil rights movement and forced intgeration created the movement that Nixonites called the "silent majority" and enabled the Republican party to soften its image as the pro-business party and embrace a "traditional values" platform, and leaving us with the Republican party we have today.
Re:Value added? (Score:5, Informative)
*What You Can't Say
Stopping Spam
So Far, So Good
Filters that Fight Back
*Hackers and Painters
*The Hundred-Year Language
*Why Nerds are Unpopular
Better Bayesian Filtering
*Design and Research
Will Filters Kill Spam?
*A Plan for Spam
Spam is Different
Filters vs. Blacklists
*Revenge of the Nerds
Succinctness is Power
*Taste for Makers
*Beating the Averages
Being Popular
*The Other Road Ahead
What Made Lisp Different
The Roots of Lisp
Programming Bottom-Up
Lisp for Web-Based Applications
Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
Five Questions about Language Design
If Lisp is So Great
Java's Cover
What Languages Fix
Chapter 1 of Ansi Common Lisp
Chapter 2 of Ansi Common Lisp
E-Commerce
And the following are on the book:
*Why Nerds Are Unpopular
*Hackers and Painters (also available at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hackpaint/chapter/
*What You Can't Say
Good Bad Attitude
*The Other Road Ahead
How to Make Wealth
Mind the Gap
*A Plan for Spam
*Taste for Makers
Programming Languages Explained
*The Hundred-Year Language
*Beating the Averages
*Revenge of the Nerds
The Dream Language
*Design and Research
the ones marked with a * are on both
I would still recommend buying his book.
Re:Value added? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Value added? (Score:5, Informative)
The ones which are also available on the website are: Why Nerds are Unpopular, Hackers and PAinters, What You Can't Say, The Other Road Ahead, The Hundred YEar Language, BEating the Averages, Revenge of the Nerds and Design and Research.
The ones which seem to be missing from the website (i.e, the ones for which youwould have to buy the book!) include Good Bad Attitude, How to Make Wealth, Mind the Gap, A Plan for Spam, Taste for Makers, Programming LAnguages Explained, The Dream Language.
There are also some on the website which are not in the book.
I had the table of contents from the book and the list of essays from the website reproduced here, but the lameness filter (designed to ensure lameness, I guess) kept saying that the characters per line was 36.
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:5, Informative)
There's a footnote about this in "What You Can't Say." If you went back to visit, say, Victorian England, your opinions would probably shock Whigs and Tories about equally. If your goal is to be close to the truth, then you are going to seem like an alien to the people of your own time. It's like projecting a point onto a line segment that is very far away. Where you end up on it is almost random.
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:3, Informative)
centrist Democrat, not a left-winger. I worked
for Henry Jackson's campaign in 1975. I found
myself repelled both by the racist conservatives
of the 1960s and the Communist-sympathizing "New
Left". I loathed both the anti-drug crowd and
the anti-war crowd. So my history of rejecting
both ends of the spectrum goes back a long way.
Re:Paul Graham's politics (Score:4, Informative)
It's hard to tell from the few essays I've read by Graham whether he is more right than left-wing, but it seems pretty clear that he is leaning to the libertarian side of things. Note that you could be both libertarian and right-wing, and have more in common with me (left-wing libertarian) than you would with GWB.
As to what the reviewer thought... sure, that might be postmodernist. A lot of people in Europe think I'm American when in fact I am Canadian; their belief and their claim does not change this. You could deconstruct the meaning of Canadian or American, but you couldn't reduce the fact I hold a Canadian (but not American) citizenship and passport.
It's murkier with political labels because there is no "proof" that can be easily produced such as a passport. All we can say then is that according to a right-left political spectrum hypothesis, much of Graham's politics seem unexplainable -perhaps even insane- while using a spectrum they are quite straightforward, and arguably more internally coherent than what passes as right or left-wing these days.
Since I don't like postmodernism all that much, I'll finish by saying in Wilberian fashion that the compass includes and transcends the old idea of the spectrum, and is therefore closer to the truth.