Another Paul Graham essay, Hackers and Painters. My thoughts, so I can remember them later.
Static vs. Dynamic typing. I get the impression he looks at programmers interactions with languages as via text files edited with a text editor. Hence static typing interfers with malleabiltiy. I think these days languages should be thought of together with their IDE, or IDEs. Static types are not a problem if you can easily change them, long variable names are not an issue if you have autocompletion.
Some interesting remarks about big companies and why startups can win. A vision is important and brilliance in programming rather than just cranking out code more cheaply than the people down the road.
And finally two quotes.
When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own.
I agree that debugging sometimes makes a nice break. I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is.
Posted by Alex at May 15, 2003 08:40 PM