Book Review Hackers and Painters - Reviewed by: Roy Troxel

Book Review:
Hackers and Painters
By Paul Graham
O'Reilly Books
Sebastapol, CA.
259 pages

Review by Roy Troxel

This is essentially a collection of essays by a multi-talented Web developer whose qualifications for writing a book like this are considerable. Graham and his partner Robert Morris built the ViaWeb storefront platform, which they sold to Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million. The jacket blurb also adds that Graham "has worked as a consultant to the US Department of Energy, DuPont, and Interleaf. He has a BA from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."

In other words, the author's opinions are largely from experience, with a good deal of academic research as well. What does this have to do with the work-a-day Webmaster? Well, I think his ideas about the future of computing are on target, plus his experiences running Viaweb are helpful to anyone wanting to start a startup. (In other words, this isn't just an ego-exercise.)

Graham suggests that you read this book not in any linear fashion, but pick out a chapter at random, one at a time. Actually, you should read each chapter two or three times, because there is some great information and advice in each one, and it isn't all obvious after one reading. This isn't a technical book as such, but as the subtitle suggests, it's about "Big ideas from the computer age." Some of the essays are already available at Graham's Web site: www.paulgraham.com

So what's the connection between painting and hacking? Well, the key element seems to be design:

Good design is simple.

In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

(Actually, Graham isn't the only person to combine hacking and painting. Justin Simoni of Dada Mail has been doing this actively for several years.)

As I see it, a site's design doesn't have to be artistic or even "look good". It has to provide a convenient interface for users to follow and, in this respect, simpler is always better. (Also cluttered Web pages make for slow downloads, but you probably already knew that.)

Graham has other opinions as well:

Why Java is Over-Rated by Managers

Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.

Graham uses a "let's see what we find" approach when developing programs. He doesn't play by the rules, but rather puts a prototype program together, tosses it into the compiler, and then conscientiously finds the bugs and works out the details of the program. (This is like the way a painter first draws a rough sketch or design, and then layer by layer fills in the details.)

Politics, Economics and Nerds

Graham adds his opinions on economics, politics and why nerds (myopic, unathletic chess buffs) get beat up by high school bullies. Possibly he's casting too wide a net here, and you won't agree with some of his opinions, but that's what makes this book interesting:

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so, you create wealth. The world is - and you specifically are - one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie [of wealth].

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth - undergraduates, reporters, politicians - hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think "injustice"! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think "is that all?" The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

And so Graham ties it all together: economics, politics, programming and nerds. If you don't agree with him, just remember that he has made millions partly on the belief system outlined above.

Running a Business

"The Other Road Ahead" and "How to Make Wealth" deal with Graham's business career as one of the founders of ViaWeb.

For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. Then one day we had the idea of making the software run on our Web server, using the browser as an interface. We tried rewriting the software to work over the Web, and it was clear that this was the way to go. If we wrote our software to run on the server, it would be a lot easier for the users and for us as well.

All from the Web

There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP.

...To the extent software does move onto servers, what I'm describing here is the future.

Not necessarily. This has been done before, in the early days of business computing, when computers consisted of "dummy" terminals used for entering data while all the computing was done on rented mainframe time.

Graham compares the push toward ASPs with the development of the automobile industry:

For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own car. But cars were such a big win that lots of people who weren't car experts wanted to have them as well.

Computers are in this phase now. When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what's happening inside it. But more than half the households in the US own one. Ordinary users shouldn't even know the words "operating system," much less "device driver" or "patch."

With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones.

Graham here is talking about the "always on" concept which might come to pass as wireless technology becomes an increasingly popular form of computing.

"If you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself."

Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.

Users and Benchmarks

Software should do what users think it will. But you can't have any idea what users will be thinking, believe me, until you watch them. And server-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. You're not limited to small, artificial focus groups.

When you have the users on your server, you don't have to rely on benchmarks, for example. Benchmarks are simulated users. With server-based software you can watch actual users. To decide what to optimize, just log into a server and see what's consuming all the CPU.

A New Tactic for Evaluating Business Competitors

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C ++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening...

If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

There's a lot more in this book, and for such a low price, it's well worth the purchase. (Or wait until it reaches your local library.)

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