the evans center for sleep deprivation studies
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aug 5 2004 12:40am
mini golf with bradee, a few weeks ago.
mini golf with bradee, a few weeks ago.

still not cut out for software pundit-dom.

I've seen a lot of discussion about Paul Graham's Great Hackers essay, so I finally went and read it. It has some interesting points -- good programmers love programming, like good tools, want to do interesting work. Here's a good quote:

It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

(That sounds a little too familiar. It burns.)

There are other enjoyable nuggets. But Paul keeps getting distracted by his religion. Good programmers like offices instead of cubes, and oh by the way smart people such as myself hate Java and Windows.

Whatever. I just like writing software that people need.

Mostly I'm tired of all these essays about "hackers". Great, you're designing a new language for brilliant people like yourself, or you wrote a command-line mail fetcher. We're impressed! Now stop speaking for the rest of us and go write code.