PatternExon

Hackers & Painters – Paul Graham

// January 26th, 2007 // books, reading, review

Its been a long & tiring two weeks & the start of the spring session has taken its toll I am a week behind schedule in reading the stuff I want to only to be compounded with the fact that now I have to read a lot of stuff I dont want to – Textbooks, Papers etc. etc. But, this was an eye opening read, it is not often that my pleasure reads complement schooling but this Paul’s writing was a subtle blend. This is the first book I have read whose author I have met in person !! So getting to it, the book has a broad introduction, with quite a detailed description of the social convolutions of an American High School. Paul quickly gets into the stuff that he likes the most (I believe) – Hacking. And takes one through the memory lane of Viaweb & indulges with quite a few prescriptions for future entrepreneurs. This also has the essay – ‘A plan for spam’ – where he talks about using Bayesian Filtering for creating anti-spammers. This was something I worked on in my one of undergrad projects – really cool stuff – especially the fact that the filter ‘evolves’ as one gets more mails, like I said really cool stuff. Then Paul slips into the beauty of LISP (& functional programming). Though I cant possibly concoct any demeanour of LISP – Hacker…… I am not sure if I could even label myself as -Newbie. But with what he tells it is easy to understand that elegance is the paradigm that is used build programs in LISP ( & Scheme, Haskell et al. ) The vigour with which he models the concept of why LISP could ( & possibly should) be used in building ‘good’ software leaves a mark. His own success story is based on his expertise in LISP.

And finally like all true Hackers he laments for a programming language that would be beautiful to write in & shows a possibe road-map to the invention of a such a language.