
"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005] - mati
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
======
jamesmcintyre
Regardless it seems Graham drawing a synthesis between hackers and painters
worked well as a generative metaphor to accomplish what he explained the books
purpose was: "This book is an attempt to explain to the world at large what
goes on in the world of computers."

In the end can your antithesis exercise as many readers' imaginations and
share as much insight as his book has?

What I got from your blog post is that there are better books for one
interested in the similarities between art and computer science and that is
helpful information but I own a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach and it's certainly
not a light read.

Maybe your right, "Hackers and Painters" doesn't belong in the same category
as the other books you mentioned but then the authors of those books probably
had different intentions for their material.

------
bokonist
PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475> PG definitely gets the best of
the argument, IMO.

~~~
ubernostrum
I've debated taking PG to task over this one:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html>

But I figure I don't need the internet drama, and I already find amusing ways
to exercise my philosophy degree.

~~~
ntoshev
"debated taking PG to task"?

Why don't you just say what you disagree with, no need to make internet drama
or necessarily get pg to respond to you. I have studied quite a bit of
philosophy and I like this essay a lot, so I would be interested in reading a
good criticism (please, please do better than idlewords, it is clearly
personal for him).

~~~
ubernostrum
Well, the opening bits about confusion of language and what to call things are
a bit... fuzzy :)

Yes, Wittgenstein focused a lot on language, but so did a lot of his
contemporaries -- that's a large part of what positivism was all about. And
the idea that coming up with correct and precise terms and categories as a
first step goes at least all the way back to Aristotle in the Western
tradition and Confucius in the Eastern. But pg doesn't mention any of this, he
just name-drops Wittgenstein and gives you the impression that this is some
sort of modern thing to do.

On the history of philosophy, I've got to mark pg down quite a lot for
outright ignoring the pre-Socratics. Do we only have fragments of their work?
Yes. Does that mean we get to write them off as "speculative cosmology"? Hell,
no. Plato and Aristotle don't make sense unless you consider them in the
context of the philosophers who came before them, primarily the Elean and
Milesian schools. And I can't understand why someone who writes so much about
entrepreneurship would willingly ignore Thales (unless it's to sweep under the
rug the fact that Thales -- though he could and did apply his analytic and
philosophical techniques to make money -- didn't seem to care much about
practical results and in fact did more than a few things to spite and shame
people who wanted such results).

I'm going to gloss over pg's interpretation of Aristotle and simply recommend
that people actually read Aristotle, or at least well-prepared exegesis of
Aristotle; that's a topic too large to tackle in a comment.

But talking about the next 1500 years' worth of philosophy just aping Plato
and Aristotle without doing any critical thinking is, well, flat-out wrong.
Aristotle was indeed highly regarded by later medieval thinkers -- after about
the eleventh century AD or so -- but he was far from the only game in town
until that point, and most of the regard for his work and Plato's wasn't due
to slavish repetition of muddled thinking: medieval philosophers simply didn't
have the kind of access to classical work that we enjoy today, and so they
used what material they had.

From there, pg goes off into what looks like his own flight of unthinking
hero-worship, but this one's centered on Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein's
important, but he was far from the first person to discover "that most
previous philosophy was a waste of time". One suspects that pg has never read,
or has forgotten what he read in, Hume, who delivered the real kick in the
pants about two centuries earlier (and quite a bit of Hume's most interesting
work had been anticipated in antiquity -- the same antiquity which, pg tells
us, was far too muddled and concerned with "big generalities" to produce
useful or interesting work).

(aside: I think this, more than anything, is what bothers me about pg's
summary of philosophy: you don't get to condense Western philosophy into a
single essay without even mentioning Hume's name. He even goes so far as to
attribute to Kant honors which -- and if you've read Kant you'll see even he
felt this way -- rightly belong to Hume.)

Finally, pg ends up at a "proposal" which, so far as I can tell, is identical
to the classical pragmatism of William James (whose name is also conspicuously
absent from the essay). He rounds this up by reiterating the falsehood that
everybody else was just aping Plato and Aristotle for a couple millennia
(perhaps pg simply misunderstood a famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead,
and took a literal interpretation).

So, basically, pg's spent a lot of time pouring out a "sea of words" riddled
with historical inaccuracies and omissions, and used it all to advocate as new
a philosophy which has been well-known for over a century. This is not
something of which I can approve :)

~~~
ntoshev
Wow, thanks.

I don't think this essay was intended to be a complete review and a last word
of all philosophy. I read it as explanation of the motivation pg has for his
essays. And I like the goal of seeking the "most general useful truth".

Now, I'm not pursuing this goal because I think most philosophical questions
should be restated as scientific questions. The problem of knowledge,
epistemology, becomes mostly cognitive science. The problem of conduct,
ethics, should be researched using simulated evolution models of game theory.
And so on and so forth.

------
jcw
I paint and I code, and this made me laugh:

* Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.

* Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

It's funny, and maybe a little ironic, to look at this and see both a hacker's
cynicism and a painter's habit of looking at things objectively.

------
baguasquirrel
I thought this was worth upvoting because I was stung by how the author views
programming. It's worth remembering that "hacking" is typically ill-liked,
even by some of those claiming to practice it.

 _Start with purpose. With the exception of art software projects (which I
don't believe Graham has in mind here) all computer programs are designed to
accomplish some kind of task._

I suppose this guy is a Java programmer?...

 _No one cares how pretty the code is if the program won't work._

...that or Perl.

 _Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer
programs never do._

#%$hole...

PG could have alluded to the similarity between Math and hacking. The thing
that I feel both share is that there is an underlying beauty to a well-crafted
result. Truly beautiful results (like original self-printing program in Lisp)
withstand the test of time, like a universal truth. Thus a program is not like
an egg made by a chef, or even a Porsche made by an engineer.

The flip side is that there's no "way" to write a program. There actually
isn't even really a notion of truth. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The
only constraint I have as a programmer is to (1) not run out of memory and (2)
not run out dough (which would force me to quit hacking and get a "real job").
There are some people who think that obfuscated C is art, and there's FP folks
like me who would fire someone for writing anything in that godawful language
(Which might be unfair. People should only be fired for writing Java on the
job). I think this is pretty strong support in favor or programming as an art.

The other piece of evidence I cite is that the academic form of hacking is
called Computer Science and we know what they say about anything that has the
word "Science" in it...

Basically, the only premise of idleword's argument that holds up is that
artists get laid and programmers don't. I will resist fighting fire with fire
on this point.

But maybe PG should allude to poets or composers next time. Apparently some
painters are real jerks.

~~~
jacquesm
There used to be _two_ professions that we call programming today:

Systems Analysis

and (unsurprisingly)

Programming.

Arguably the systems analysis bit was the more interesting of the two, it is
the one that I would equate with architecture, and to some extent (but
certainly not as much as some would) art.

The other part, the programming part is best equated to engineering and
construction.

I find I go through exactly those two phases when making something new. The
first part I love to do it's where all the interesting bits are, the problems
get solved.

By the time I hit the second phase, the joyful part is over, from there it is
just typing stuff in and realizing the vision that I already have in my head
and debugging stuff.

Rarely (but it does happen occasionally) do I get back in the 'fun' bits while
coding something. That would mean I've made some terrible oversight during the
analysis phase.

The analysis phase sometimes also includes some programming, it is where you
come up with nifty little programs to test your assumption and where you let
your inspiration go wild in order to see if you can solve the problem in an
interesting way.

That is the most joyful kind of programming that I know, it is on a white
piece of paper without any kind of connection to the real world of data
processing. This is were algorithms are born. I love doing that.

The rest is just plumbing and brickwork.

~~~
baguasquirrel
So if we are going to judge programming as such, then what about all the
plumbing and brickwork associated with art? Didn't an analysis of the Mona
Lisa detect multiple layers of paint, indicating that the artist had retouched
many parts of it? From what I understand, it's common practice.

For some reason, the plumbing and brickwork in programming isn't viewed the
same way by all people. Perhaps it's because of the use of low level languages
(and by low level, I mean anything less abstract than Ruby, Lisp or Haskell.
you can't meaningfully remove boilerplate in the C family of languages.). I
personally find it gratifying to refactor code into something more elegant,
and I'm sorry if you don't see it that way.

~~~
jacquesm
> So if we are going to judge programming as such, then what about all the
> plumbing and brickwork associated with art?

In 'real' art (painting and sculpture for instance) the execution and the
expression are inseparable, in programming you can delineate the one from the
other reasonably well.

For instance, a mathematician without any programming skills could sketch out
the basis of an algorithm, which could then be implemented by programmers
familiar with their particular language.

> Didn't an analysis of the Mona Lisa detect multiple layers of paint,
> indicating that the artist had retouched many parts of it?

Yes, so ? He didn't get it 'right' or 'satisfactory' the first time and
decided to change it.

But there is a reason why artists sign their works and programmers can
collaborate, even across vast distances on the same work.

In the end it is all bits.

If Da Vinci had reduced the idea of the La Gioconda to 4 squares and you asked
four different painters to create the 4 squares and you'd merge them the
painting would probably not be hanging in the Louvre right now.

Even if he had sketched it and sent it off in four pieces as a guide it still
wouldn't have worked.

And that process works quite well for software, which indicates to me that the
two are fundamentally different.

> For some reason, the plumbing and brickwork in programming isn't viewed the
> same way by all people.

No doubt.

> Perhaps it's because of the use of low level languages (and by low level, I
> mean anything less abstract than Ruby or Haskell). I personally find it
> gratifying to refactor code into something more elegant, and I'm sorry if
> you don't see it that way.

Refactoring code and optimizations are a step above simply putting layers of
stone above each other, effectively you've temporarily switched back to
architectural mode.

And I definitely agree with you that that is a gratifying thing to do. But it
_also_ indicates to me that I should be more diligent during the design phase
because refactoring, no matter how satisfying is an expensive thing to do.

~~~
baguasquirrel
_But there is a reason why artists sign their works and programmers can
collaborate, even across vast distances on the same work. In the end it is all
bits._

Ok, I have to admit, that is by and far the most compelling difference between
art and programming that I've ever heard.

------
balding_n_tired
Curious that Maciej should cite John Ruskin, who could be utterly dogmatic.
Henry James, Italian Hours, writes

I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned
from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have
gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three
yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in
the choir of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books
that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had
thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive
assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour
that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had
risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost
patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed
I lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal
votary of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed flaneur's quiet
contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of
the loveliest of cities. The little books seemed invidious and insane, and it
was only when I remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them
that I checked myself in repenting of having done so.

