Sun, 01 Aug 2004

The great hackers furore

I’ve already made mention of Paul Graham’s recent paper, Great Hackers. Since then, I’ve discovered that everybody on earth seems to have an opinion on it and can’t wait to share it. I might as well join in.

I’m sure that there are people out there who think Paul Graham was right, or largely right, in this paper; but the articles that I’m seeing seem to be exclusively on the theme: “Paul Graham is wrong” or the alternate theme: “Paul Graham is an idiot.”

It’s easy to dispose of the “idiot” proposal. Paul Graham is not an idiot, at least not as an overall judgement. But he’s certainly wrong, in most of his papers, and more than usual in this one. The curious thing is that the critics all seem to see different devils in the great hackers paper. One could easily conclude, especially if one were only to read the critics rather than the paper, that the critics were all feeling seriously on the defensive because Paul Graham managed to press some of their sensitive buttons. I’m pretty certain that this is so to some degree.

The worst thing about the paper—and this applies to all his papers in the form they appear on the web—is that he really is an idiot when it comes to publishing web pages. Every paper is published in an extremely narrow column that just makes it a chore to read. That’s plain silly. And it’s inexcusable in somebody who is intelligent and who has been around the web a bit. The printed form, as found in his recent book Hackers & Painters, is quite attractive (largely thanks to LaTeX).

But back to great hackers. It’s easy to find stuff to disagree with in this paper; and it’s easy enough to find stuff that you can feel comfortable describing as just plain wrong—but I think many of the critics who are doing this might have missed the point. This paper is not a scholarly treatise, such as he would have submitted for his PhD. It was a keynote speech at a hackers’ conference. It was meant to be at least mildly controversial; it was meant to make people argue the toss about its intentions. It seems to me that it succeeded admirably in that.

Of course, since I said it was easy to find fault with it, I suppose I should do that too. Let’s take one quote that rankled with many people:

The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.

That’s obviously just silly. Anybody can learn Python in an hour or two, assuming it’s not their first programming language. So it will be easy to get Python programmers. But there’s no guarantee that they’ll be very smart. On the other hand, since nobody can learn Java, anybody who has got their head around enough of Java to look like a Java programmer just has to be fairly smart. Naturally, the smartest programmers in the set who learned Java will have been smart enough to move on—and their skill levels will have made the moving on simple enough to do. What will the smartest programmers be using? They will be skilled in C; they’ll be strong in Python and/or Perl; they’ll have some interesting and powerful languages at their command, such as Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, and a bunch of others that will be obvious enough.

Here’s another one that provoked quite a lot of resentment:

The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems.

This claim seems to be more of a matter of personal preferences. I know that some people seem to work well in the midst of chaos. I know that I need quite time when I’m doing some serious programming. If I had to work in noisy offices so that I could fulfil my role of expert on call, then I made it my business to find some way to give myself quiet time to do the programming part of my job. Sometimes that meant doing it at home; sometimes, starting very early in the morning or working late at night; and sometimes it involved weekend work. But it was always possible to arrange things so that I could manage the high concentration I needed for programming some of the time, while also providing the other services that I was being paid to provide.

There’s lots more, but it’s obvious from what I’ve already covered that this is too easy a target. I think a large part of the problem is that, not only have people failed to take into account the purpose of the paper, but they have also managed to get confused over definitions. There are lots of definitions of “hacker”; there are lots of people who fit one or more of those definitions; but it seems to me that a lot of people are letting their definition get in the way of understanding the intent of the paper. It has some interesting and provocative ideas. Nobody is going to agree with all of it. Probably most people will disagree with a lot of it. But if it makes you think about what it is to be a programmer and about where you want to go with your work, then it has served its purpose.

Posted at: 16:57

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