Flashes of Panic

Yesterday at PT I finished Paul Graham’s book, Hackers and Painters. Maybe I’m particularly receptive to non-fiction due to my high levels of John McPhee lately, but I was very impressed with Graham’s book.

If you’ve heard of Paul Graham recently, it’s probably not because of his biggest project, creating the software that would become Yahoo! Store; more likely it’s because of his 2002 essay, “A Plan for Spam” which first proposed the statistical-analysis approach to email filtering used by nearly every modern spam filter.

It’s hard to pigeonhole the book. It’s not about something in particular; it’s subtitled “Big Ideas from the Computer Age,” and that’s pretty much the size of it. Why geeks are unpopular. Why applications are going to move off the desktop and on to web servers, paid for on a subscription model. The difference between “making money” and “creating wealth” and why you can create more wealth in a startup than working for a regular company. A lot of thoughts about programming languages.

It’s not entirely a computer book. There are some bits that aren’t immediately clear if you’re not a geek, but when he does really jargony things (like use “diff” as a verb) he at least provides an endnote. I think I would get more out of the languages section if I knew more about more of the languages in question. If I wanted to peg the level of jargon, I’d put it close to Eric Raymond’s How To Become A Hacker essay; the tone is fairly close, as well.

It’s full of little moments—acknowledging, for example, how chasing a challenging bug can be rewarding, at least for a little while. (I managed to squash one this afternoon which had been on my to-do list for quite a while.)

Most of the essays in the book are also available on Graham’s website, along with some others, but I found the book format much easier to deal with. It’s a good place to look to see if you’d like his style; both it and the book are likely to expose you to some new ideas.

Now playing: Alleluia from The Honesty Room by Dar Williams