Programmer Musings

Review of Hackers & Painters

Hackers & Painters
Paul Graham
O'Reilly, 2004

I was really looking forward to reading this book. I had read a few of Graham's essays in the past and found his ideas to be thought-provoking. I expected some to find more of the same.

Instead, this book ranged over a lot of topics, not all of them big ideas. Some of the chapters did make me think, some insights were definitely worth considering. Unfortunately, some of the chapters were based on extremely simplified views of the past couple of decades.

Graham's chapters on business and making money ignore the cut-throat business practices that many companies thrive on. He suggests that CEOs really are worth 100 times as much as the average employee, because they direct the company as a whole. Unfortunately, all you have to do is look at the news over the last few years to see that belief is flawed. He describes Microsoft as being run by a brilliant and lucky technologist. In the process, he ignores the way they have often used legal clout and monopolistic practices to stay on top.

Graham's assertion that all applications will move to the web and all data will reside on the servers also seems a bit premature. He asserts that servers will be better maintained, backed up, and protected from viruses. We have seen plenty of cases where that wasn't true. He also dismisses the security implications of someone else owning your data as if it were a minor annoyance.

Graham is obviously enamored with Lisp. I agree it is a powerful language, but I'm not sure that it is the most powerful language as he suggests. I find it funny that that he says the ability to provide code for read-time, compile-time, and run-time is a feature in no other language except Lisp. But, I used that ability for years in Forth. He also makes the mistake of assuming that the power of a language is a single dimension, without taking into account that some languages are more powerful than others for a particular job.

All in all, I found this book to be a disappointment. If you were already interested in Graham's views, I wouldn't try to convince you not to read the book. But, I'm afraid that I would not recommend the book.