Paul Graham
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Paul Graham (1964 -) American essayist, entrepreneur and Lisp Programmer/Advocate, most famous for his essays on hackers, startups, and programming languages.
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Five Questions about Language Design (May 2001)
- Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.
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Taste for Makers (February 2002)
- At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.
- Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.
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Revenge of the Nerds (May 2002)
- The terms "cutting-edge" and "accounting" do not sound good together.
- If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.
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A Plan for Spam (August 2002)
- As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.
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Design and Research (January 2003)
- The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.
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Why Nerds are Unpopular (February 2003)
- Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one.
- The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.
- "When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us."
- "Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity."
- "Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."
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Hackers and Painters (May 2003)
- A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.
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What You Can't Say (January 2004)
- How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?
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Hackers & Painters (May 2004)
Several essays found in the book are also freely available at Paulgraham.com. Only those quotes from essays available exclusively on the printed book are listed below.
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The Dream Language
- If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?
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How To Make Wealth
- The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.
- When those far removed from the creation of wealth—undergraduates, reporters, politicians—hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
- A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
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Mind the Gap
- When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets. I didn't realize there were power plants out there generating it. Likewise, it doesn't occur to most kids that wealth is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something that flows from parents.
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Great Hackers (July 2004)
- I didn't mean to make the book controversial. 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.
- I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.
- It's hard to say exactly what constitutes research in the computer world, but as a first approximation, it's software that doesn't have users.
- If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise), and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.
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What You'll Wish You'd Known (January 2005)
- Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.... Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time.
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Hiring is Obsolete (May 2005)
- Employers are just proxies for users in which risk is pooled.
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How to Start a Startup (March 2005)
- There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
- Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
- It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
- What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
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Undergraduation (March 2005)
- College is where faking stops working.
- Like a lot of people, I was mathematically abused as a child. I learned to think of math as a collection of formulas that were neither beautiful nor had any relation to my life (despite attempts to translate them into "word problems"), but had to be memorized in order to do well on tests.
- If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack Blub on Windows. If you want to work at a cool little company or research lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux. And if you want to start your own company, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.
- In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.
- The greatest advantage of a PhD (besides being the union card of academia, of course) may be that it gives you some baseline confidence.
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Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas (April 2005)
- The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out.
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How to Fund a Startup (November 2005)
- Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.
- Consulting is where product companies go to die.
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Attributed
- I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would *really* like to avoid it.
- A comment in Lemonodor
- The problem is that I have only one life. I would love to be able to fork off twenty different processes. In one I'd start a publishing company publishing books that are actually good, instead of having to fall into the current bimodal distribution between pretentious "literary" writing, and mere potboilers. In another I'd be an architect. In another I'd paint; I have about four lifes' worth of ideas about what to do just in painting. In another (separate from the one where I become a publisher) I'd write fiction.
- A comment in Lemonodor
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