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Hackers and Painters
paulgraham.com

Hackers and Painters

17 insights saved from this article by @technology
  1. @technology· Software
    People rarely become excellent hackers without loving it, and hackers who love the craft build software in spare time.
  2. @technology· Software
    The original 1985 Macintosh succeeded because users never had to understand or prepare for the software.
  3. @technology· Software
    Premature design is as dangerous as premature optimization. Deciding too early what a program should do limits later discovery.
  4. @technology· Software
    Makers learn from masterpieces by reproducing how successful works were constructed, not merely by observing their results.
  5. @technology· Software
    New mediums are explored most intensely during their first generations, when novelty gives creators unusual energy.
  6. @technology· Software
    Institutions rely on publications, standardized tests, and lines of code because they are easy to apply, despite loosely tracking achievement.
  7. @technology· Software
    A programming language should be a pencil for discovering designs, not a pen for recording decisions already made.
  8. @technology· Software
    Broken code is a sketch: debugging is not cleanup after creation, but part of programming’s creative process.
  9. @technology· Software
    Write programs for people to read, then let machines execute them incidentally. Readability serves collaborators and your future self.
  10. @technology· Software
    AI shows how wrong starting assumptions generate huge research literatures. Predicate logic makes knowledge representation difficult.
  11. @technology· Software
    Rigid static typing fits fully predesigned programs, but conflicts with the exploratory, sketch-like way hackers actually work.
  12. @technology· Software
    Figure out programs while writing them through experimentation and debugging, instead of designing everything on paper first.

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