Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Hackers and Painters

Programmers and artists have a lot in common, so says Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters. The book contains a lot of insight into life in general, but is aimed at those who create software.

I found the first chapter particularly insightful. It's about high school, and how and why kids get divided into levels of coolness. But you don't have to buy the book to read it, as it is available on Google Books.

If you liked the first chapter, I suspect you'll like the rest of the book, but I can't say for sure. As you get deeper into the book, Graham gets more technical and starts to pontificate on the best programming languages, which lost me a little bit. While I coded enough to create conferencecalltranscripts.org, I am far from being able to fully use the power of the languages I know, so this discussion was a little bit over my head.

Graham appears to have a very good grasp of history, however, and you may appreciate many of his insights regardless of your affinity for creating software.

Enjoy!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, how many pages you read a day? Any speed reading courses?

Thank you, O.

Saj Karsan said...

Hi O,

It's hard to keep track of the number of pages, particularly when a lot of it is filings/transcripts/articles that I read online.

Regarding reading faster, yes I highly recommend this