As painters must please an audience, hackers must please their users. Keep the end user in mind when you start designing your product. To collect feedback from real users, first, create and launch a prototype. Even a very stripped-down prototype early on gets you valuable feedback so you can correct mistakes and improve the product. The more users you have, the more successful your company will be. When someone considers buying your company, the value will be based on the number of users you have.

How to make great things

Being smart in a typical American secondary school makes life difficult as teenagers would rather focus on being popular. Nerds are smart but not socially adept. They avoid social interaction and instead focus their energy on becoming smarter, not adopting fashionable norms. This causes nerds not to be very popular at school. Yet, nerds seem to do just fine after high school and in the real world, as being trendy doesn’t matter so much.

Why nerds are unpopular

Regardless of how hard you work in a large corporation, your wages won’t increase substantially. Instead, start a company as it is the fastest way to make money. The rich aren’t hoarding wealth because wealth isn’t limited. Chances are that the richest individuals have worked harder and more productively than most people. If you want to make a million dollars, you must endure a million dollars worth of pain.

How to make wealth

There are many languages programmers can code in, like C++, Python, and Java, as certain things are more easily expressed in one language than another. For example, the language List allows you to tell the computer to add variables Y and X with only two lines of code. Python does not recognise variables, so you will have problems if you try to add Y to X. A workaround could be six lines of code. New languages are still developed, and existing ones are constantly evolving. These days, any developer can adapt and develop current programming languages or even create their own.

Programming languages explained

Companies find it easier to hire programmers who code in popular languages. It means there will always be more hackers using popular languages than obscure ones. But if programmers as forced to use one language for everything, you won’t get the best performance out of your product. You are most likely facing the same issue as your competitors and could gain a significant advantage by switching to a more optimized language.

 The downside to using popular languages

Hackers are makers, like painters or writers. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation, similar to painters who need to understand paint chemistry. Hacking and Sketching are similar: good software is put out there and gradually searched, refined, and sometimes beaten into shape over continuous iterations. You learn to hack by hacking. You also learn from examples. Great software requires devotion to beauty, even the parts you don’t expect anyone ever to see. Software should be well-written, readable, and well documented.

Hackers and Painters

Successful computer programming does not require rigid adherence to rules and conventions. More often, becoming a hacker involves breaking some rules. To learn how to hack, you must look at others’ work, even if the work is protected by intellectual property rights. The only way to become innovative is to question the established ideas and seek ways to improve them.

Hackers must break rules to be good at what they do

As hackers develop as programmers, they will recognise the value of good taste in the programming languages they use. A language that is too complex or limiting will simply be avoided by hackers. A language that meets hackers' needs will become popular, which means hackers will develop it further to improve it. For example, open-source languages such as Perl and Python.

Programming languages should be designed according to the needs of hackers

Timeless essays from Paul Graham on the internet, building wealth, startups, and more.

"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " --from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care? Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West." The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

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"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " --from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West."The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

Programming languages explained

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