This link has been bookmarked by 20 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Jul 2006, by Bernardo Schepop.
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30 Jul 16
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What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers
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Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things
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who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters
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11 Mar 16
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What and how should not be kept too separate. You're asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it.
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23 Jan 15
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of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
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What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.
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Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions.
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Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry
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The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.
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Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible.
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Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It's hard for such people to design great software [5], because they can't see things from the user's point of view.
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At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would our competitors hate most? At one point a competitor added a feature to their software that was basically useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they made much of it in the trade press. We could have tried to explain that the feature was useless, but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon.
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22 Aug 14
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Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code
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25 Dec 13
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cruft
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illicit
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solipsists
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frenzied
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frenzied
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primal
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primal
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tenuously
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meatier
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predicate
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predicate
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scholastic
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remiss
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spew out
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spew out
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scribble and smudge and smear
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scribble and smudge and smear
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While we're on the subject of static typing, identifying with the makers will save us from another problem that afflicts the sciences: math envy. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their work look as mathematical as possible. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the further you get from the natural sciences, the more of a problem it becomes.
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entrusting
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combat
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chronological
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illicit
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juniper
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bleak
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cruft
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Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.
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solipsists
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sworn off
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roundabout
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playwright
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playwright
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kludge
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kludge
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30 Nov 13
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13 Jun 07
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09 Apr 07
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What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.
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Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.
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It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.
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One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical question to someone without a technical background.
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Source code, too, should explain itself. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one at the beginning of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
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22 Mar 07
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15 Oct 06
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28 Jul 06
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02 Mar 04
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