Let it be widely known that I have not become a morning person yet. This is just information for your own benefit.
In between exams, I was browsing the news and scouring for things to post over on Fanblogs, but I ran across a really interesting article by Paul Graham about “hackers” (not people illegally breaking into systems, mind you, but what most folks call “programmers”) It basically likens hackers to painters instead of scientists. I’ve culled some quotes for your perusal… the article is definitely worth a read, even if you’re not a big techie nerd.
I’ve never liked the term “computer science.” The main reason I don’t like it is that there’s no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.
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There are worse things than having people misunderstand your work. A worse danger is that you will yourself misunderstand your work.
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Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this.
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When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else’s point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.
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To write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They’re going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they’re not going to read the manual.
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What you learn about programming in college is much like what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in high school.
I may be the only person to visit my site ever that actually finds that article interesting, but it really does have some good insight to it. If you are a programmer, know one, are dating one, or ever think you might work with one, you really need to read it. Seriously.
Go now.
…what are you still doing here? GO
May 8th, 2003 at 1:26 pm
I\’d like to add this to your list of great quotes,
You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people\’s ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.
July 24th, 2004 at 1:07 am
Cool article!!
Too bad it’s so hard to concentrate and read it due to my roommate’s birthday celebration gettogether thingy in the background.