Arc at 3 Weeks. November 2001 1.
Preliminaries: - Arc isn't finished. - Suggestions are invited. - Don't be too shocked (you may get used to it). Arc was the youngest language presented at LL1. A few of the ideas in Arc will seem shocking, especially to compiler writers. 2. . - A language with dialects. - No new Lisp since mid 80s (and not new then). - Languages different now: Unix won, big libraries, active development. - No onions in the varnish. Lisp. Lisp History. Taste for Makers. February 2002 I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT.
His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste. " Taste. Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. For those of us who design things, these are not just theoretical questions. If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that "taste is subjective. " Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle unexamined. Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they tell us. What goes through the kid's head at this point? The Hundred-Year Language. April 2003 (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)
It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.
Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. This is worth thinking about not so much because we'll actually get to use these languages as because, if we're lucky, we'll use languages on the path from this point to that. I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented. There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the smartest programmers I know are some of the least excited about it.
My own feeling is that object-oriented programming is a useful technique in some cases, but it isn't something that has to pervade every program you write. You should be able to define new types, but you shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. I think there are five reasons people like object-oriented programming, and three and a half of them are bad: Y Combinator. A Student's Guide to Startups. October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)
Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup could well become as popular as grad school. The most ambitious students will at this point be asking: Why wait till you graduate? A year and a half ago I gave a talk where I said that the average age of the founders of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft was 24, and that if grad students could start startups, why not undergrads?
Paul Graham. The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail.
After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups.
It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer-- so even college students can participate. The Word "Hacker" April 2004 To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers.
Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not. To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses. Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also connected.