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Dabblers And Blowhards (Idle Words)

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About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters, in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science". When this essay came out, I was working as a computer programmer, and since I had also spent a few years as a full-time oil painter, everybody who read the article and knew me sent along the hyperlink. I didn't particularly enjoy the essay — I thought the overall tone was glib, and I found the parallel to painting unconvincing — but it didn't seem like anything worth getting worked up about. Just another programmer writing about what made him tick. But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last

Dabblers And Blowhards (Idle Words) --> « Elephants Invade Manhattan In Which I Quit My Job » 04.04. 2005 Dabblers And Blowhards I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would *really* like to avoid it - Paul Graham, posting on lemonodor.com About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by ana

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