Paul Graham - Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

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FOR MOM

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First on the list of people I have to thank is Sarah Harlin. After writingan essay I usually showed it to her first. And she usually crossed outhalf of it and told me to rewrite the rest. She has a perfect ear for proserhythm, and barks at superfluous words like a dog after a squirrel.

If these essays are any good its because most grew out of conversationswith her or with Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, or Jackie McDonough. Im lucky to know them.

The book benefits from the ideas of several other friends with whomIve talked about these questions over the past several years: Ken Anderson,Chip Coldwell, Matthias Felleisen, Dan Friedman, Daniel Giffin,Shiro Kawai, Lisa Randall, Eric Raymond, Olin Shivers, Bob van derZwaan, and David Weinberger. Eric Raymond I owe special thanks notjust for his ideas but for his example in writing about hacking.

I owe thanks to many others for help and ideas, including JlideAker, Chris Anderson, Jonathan Bachrach, Ingrid Bassett, Jeff Bates,Alan Bawden, Andrew Cohen, Cindy Cohn, Kate Courteau, Maria Daniels,Rich Draves, Jon Erickson, John Foderaro, Bob Frankston, ErannGat, Phil Greenspun, Ann Gregg, Amy Harmon, Andy Hertzfeld, JeremyHylton, Brad Karp, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Fritz Kunze, Joel Lehrer,Henry Leitner, Larry Lessig, Simon London, John McCarthy, DougMcIlroy, Rob Malda, Julie Mallozzi, Matz, Larry Mihalko, Mark Nitzberg,North Shore United, Peter Norvig, the Parmets, Sesha Pratap, JoelRainey, Jonathan Rees, Guido van Rossum, Barry Shein, the Sloos,MikeSmith, Ryan Stanley, Guy Steele, Sam Steingold, Anton van Straaten,Greg Sullivan, Brad Templeton, Dave Touretzky, Mike Vanier, the Weickers,JonL White, Stephen Wolfram, and Bill Yerazunis.

This book looks good because the design was really done by typographygod Gino Lee, not me. I know enough about book design to dowhatever Gino says. Chip Coldwell spent hours beating on fonts andAmy Hendrickson days writing LaTex macros to achieve the appearanceof ease you see here. The cover, curiously, was in a sense designed byRobert Morris, who fired up the Gimp and did some surgery on the previous version. Thanks to Gilberte Houbart for her ingenuity and persistencein extracting images from sources all over the world.

The guys at OReilly did an excellent job: Allen Noren, whose genuineinterest in making good books is enough to restore ones faith inthe book business; Betsy Waliszewski, whose vision for a more popularbook stealthily became mine; Matt Hutchinson, Robert Romano, andClaire Cloutier, who made production run smoothly; and Tim OReilly,who shows what publishing can be when a publisher is a person ratherthan a conglomerate.

Extra special thanks to Jessica Livingston. Her advice improved everypart of this book, from the front cover to the index. Her unfailingencouragement made the book better too: by telling me constantly thatlots of people would want to read it, she frightened me into trying hardto make it something lots of people would want to read.

I learned about hacking from many people, but I learned about paintingmostly from one: Idelle Weber, a great teacher all the better for teachingby example. Im deeply indebted to her and her husband Julian foryears of kindness.

Thanks finally to my father, for teaching me skepticism, and to mymother, for teaching me imagination. Having her for a mom has beenlike seeing the world in color.

28 Leonardo Da Vinci, Ginevra de Benci , Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Imagecopyright 2004 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Arts, Washington.

32 Copyright Archivo Iconografico S.A./Corbis.

52 Photograph by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced by permission of SteveWozniak.

83 Copyright Popular Electronics . Courtesy of the Computer History Museum.

86 Courtesy Albuquerque Police Department.

135 Photograph by and reproduced by permission of John Colley.

139 Photograph by Alexei Nabarro, via iStockphoto.

140 The Royal Collection. Image copyright 2004, Her Majesty QueenElizabeth II.

142 Courtesy of the NASA Dryden Photo Collection.

143 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien.

184 Reproduced by permission of Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

185 Reproduced by permission of John McCarthy.

The chapters are all independent of one another, so you dont haveto read them in order, and you can skip any that bore you. If youcome across a technical term you dont know, take a look in theGlossary, or in , which explains a lot of the conceptsunderlying software.

We regret to inform readers that, after reading .

http://www.paulgraham.com

This book is an attempt to explain to the world at largewhat goes on in the world of computers. So its not just for programmers.For example, is about how to get rich. Ibelieve this is a topic of general interest.

You may have noticed that a lot of the people getting rich inthe last thirty years have been programmers. Bill Gates, SteveJobs, Larry Ellison. Why? Why programmers, rather than civilengineers or photographers or actuaries? How to Make Wealthexplains 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 ComputerAge. It was supposed to be the Space Age, or the Atomic Age. Butthose were just names invented by PR people. Computers havehad far more effect on the form of our lives than space travel ornuclear technology.

Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriteris gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turnedinto one. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car hasmore processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe hadin 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your localstore are being replaced by the Internet. So if you want to understandwhere we are, and where were going, it will help if youunderstand whats going on inside the heads of hackers.

Hackers? Arent those the people who break into computers?Among outsiders, thats what the word means. But within the computerworld, expert programmers refer to themselves as hackers.And since the purpose of this book is to explain how things reallyare in our world, I decided it was worth the risk to use the wordswe use.

The earlier chapters answer questions we have probably allthought about. What makes a startup succeed? Will technologycreate a gap between those who understand it and those who dont?What do programmers do? Why do kids who cant master highschool end up as some of the most powerful people in the world?Will Microsoft take over the Internet? What to do about spam?

Several later chapters are about something most people outsidethe computer world havent thought about: programminglanguages. Why should you care about programming languages?Because if you want to understand hacking, this is the thread tofollowjust as, if you wanted to understand the technology of1880, steam engines were the thread to follow.