Paul Graham and Tim O'Reilly

I recently added Paul Graham's Hacker's and Painters essay to the Required Reading list in the right hand margin of this blog.

Graham's essay touches on so much! I've often wrestled with the questions of whether programming is an art or a science, whether software engineering techniques are more harmful than helpful, and why it is that so many of the people I know in the business are involved with music "on the side" and so many others are into fantasy/sci-fi and role-playing games.. Graham has really crystalized it all beautifully in this essay with his observation that we are, at heart, "makers".

Although it is somewhat tangential to the main points of the essay, however, my favorite is "Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies." It's so true, and I'm so glad I chose to leave the big company world more than a decade ago.

Tim O'Reilly's commentary on Graham is also worth checking out. I don't quite buy into his claim that most of the new killer apps run on the "LAMP" platform, but that's because I'm not a single-minded promoter of Internet technologies the way he is. (And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, btw!) I do think that what he observes about the "P" languages (Perl, Python, PHP) is just as true of the Domino programming framework -- which I have been a single-minded promoter of for a long time ;-)