Trevor Burnham

This is the second in a series of posts about Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters.

The second chapter of Hackers & Painters, the one that lends it title to the book, is easily con­densed into a common aphorism: “Pro­gram­ming is more of an art than a science.”

The extended metaphor of the essay, how programs begin as sketches that morph and become filled in over time, is a bit over­played. “In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Some­times you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems inter­est­ing.” Well, isn’t that true of all endeav­ors? From studying eco­nom­ics to Quiz Bowl to building CarlWIki, I remember my entire under­grad­u­ate expe­ri­ence as an alter­nat­ing series of bursts of interest. Even when I had a 9-​​to-​​5 job working at a college book­store, there were days when I was excited about effi­ciently pro­cess­ing textbook returns (seri­ously!), and other days that were like watching grass grow.

There are also parts that ring hollow, perhaps simply because Graham and I are dif­fer­ent kinds of hackers. He writes, “I like debug­ging: it’s the one time that hacking is as straight­for­ward as people think it is. You have a totally con­strained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you’re going to win in the end. It’s as relaxing as painting a wall.” Painting a wall is just one of many things I’d rather be doing than spending a whole day tracking down a bug. Walking slowly across a pit of hot coals is another. To me, the pleasure of hacking is the pleasure of turning a good design into a reality. I enjoy dis­cov­er­ing unex­pected subtleties—what I’d thought was a simple design might turn out to be quite intri­cate and delicate—but not outright bugs.

The high­lights of the chapter to the people most likely to read Graham these days are the bits on business: “If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big com­pa­nies want to decrease the standard devi­a­tion of design outcomes because they want to avoid dis­as­ters. But when you damp oscil­la­tions, you lose the high points as well as the low… So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you.”

Chapter 3 is a dif­fer­ent kettle of fish. In “What You Can’t Say,” Graham starts by asking what heresies a time traveler from the future might be sur­prised by in our era. Then he broadens his scope: “I want to find general recipes for dis­cov­er­ing what you can’t say, in any era.” This is not, of course, his true aim. As the chapter goes on, it grad­u­ally shifts away from being a how-​​to guide on iden­ti­fy­ing heresies toward being a combat manual for waging war on polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. It’s a deft tactical maneuver. Rather than standing up and shouting Larry Summers was right! (though he does mention him in passing), he merely suggests that smart people are more likely than others to “think unthink­able thoughts,” and advises that they be cautious in what they say.

As Graham alle­gor­i­cally explains: “Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Pro­pos­als to paint anything yellow are denounced as ‘yel­low­ist,’ as is anyone sus­pected of liking the color. People who like orange are tol­er­ated but viewed with sus­pi­cion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying so, you’ll be denounced as a yel­low­ist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of argu­ments with anti-​​yellowists. If your aim in life is to reha­bil­i­tate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly inter­ested in other ques­tions, being labeled as a yel­low­ist will just be a dis­trac­tion. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.”

At other times, he’s more explicit: “You can attack labels with meta-​​labels… The spread of the term ‘polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness’ meant the begin­ning of the end of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, because it enabled one to attack the phe­nom­e­non as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.” And: “What counts as pornog­ra­phy and violence? And what, exactly, is ‘hate speech’? That sounds like a phrase out of 1984.” And: “So when you see state­ments being attacked as x-​​ist or y-​​ic (sub­sti­tute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that some­thing is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.”

Here Graham is advo­cat­ing what count­less smart people do but don’t talk about: Being icon­o­clasts inter­nally without starting argu­ments wherever they go. They think outside of the box, but speak within it. “The problem is,” he sighs, “there are so many things you can’t say. If you said them all you’d have no time left for your real work. You’d have to turn into Noam Chomsky.” An awful fate for a hacker, indeed.

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