HACKERS & PAINTERS
Big Ideas from the Computer Age
PAUL GRAHAM
Hackers & Painters
Big Ideas from the
Computer Age
beijing cambridge
farnham k¨oln paris sebastopol
taipei tokyo
Copyright c 2004 Paul Graham. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.,
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly & Associates books may be purchased for educational,
business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available
for most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our
corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or
[email protected].
Editor: Allen Noren
Production Editor: Matt Hutchinson
Printing History:
May 2004: First Edition.
The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark
of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The cover design and related
trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
The cover image is Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel in
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This
reproduction is copyright c Corbis.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to
distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those
designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of
a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book,
the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions,
or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
ISBN : - 596-00662-4
[C]
13- 978 0-
for mom
Note to readers
The chapters are all independent of one another, so you don’t have
to read them in order, and you can skip any that bore you. If you
come across a technical term you don’t know, take a look in the
Glossary, or in Chapter 10, which explains a lot of the concepts
underlying software.
We regret to inform readers that, after reading Chapter 5, Mi-
crosoft’s PR firm were unable to grant us permission to reproduce
any of their photographs of Bill Gates. We thank the Albuquerque
Police Department for the substitute reproduced on page 86.
www.paulgraham.com
Contents
preface ix
1. Why Nerds Are Unpopular 1
Their minds are not on the game.
2. Hackers and Painters 18
Hackers are makers, like painters or architects or writers.
3. What You Can’t Say 34
How to think heretical thoughts and what to do with them.
4. Good Bad Attitude 50
Like Americans, hackers win by breaking rules.
5. The Other Road Ahead 56
Web-based software offers the biggest opportunity since the
arrival of the microcomputer.
6. How to Make Wealth 87
The best way to get rich is to create wealth. And startups are
the best way to do that.
7. Mind the Gap 109
Could “unequal income distribution” be less of a problem
than we think?
8. A Plan for Spam 121
Till recently most experts thought spam filtering wouldn’t
work. This proposal changed their minds.
9. Taste for Makers 130
How do you make great things?
10. Programming Languages Explained 146
What a programming language is and why they are a hot
topic now.
11. The Hundred-Year Language 155
How will we program in a hundred years? Why not
start now?
12. Beating the Averages 169
For web-based applications you can use whatever language
you want. So can your competitors.
13. Revenge of the Nerds 181
In technology, “industry best practice” is a recipe for losing.
14. The Dream Language 200
A good programming language is one that lets hackers have
their way with it.
15. Design and Research 216
Research has to be original. Design has to be good.
notes 223
acknowledgments 237
image credits 239
glossary 241
index 251
Preface
This book is an attempt to explain to the world at large
what goes on in the world of computers. So it’s not just for pro-
grammers. For example, Chapter 6 is about how to get rich. I
believe this is a topic of general interest.
You may have noticed that a lot of the people getting rich in
the last thirty years have been programmers. Bill Gates, Steve
Jobs, Larry Ellison. Why? Why programmers, rather than civil
engineers or photographers or actuaries? “How to Make Wealth”
explains why.
The money in software is one instance of a more general trend,
and that trend is the theme of this book. This is the Computer
Age. It was supposed to be the Space Age, or the Atomic Age. But
those were just names invented by PR people. Computers have
had far more effect on the form of our lives than space travel or
nuclear technology.
Everything around us is turning into computers. Your type-
writer is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned
into one. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car has
more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe had
in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local
store are being replaced by the Internet. So if you want to un-
derstand where we are, and where we’re going, it will help if you
understand what’s going on inside the heads of hackers.
Hackers? Aren’t those the people who bre...
