

Holding a Program in One's Head (2007) - ColinWright
http://paulgraham.com/head.html

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philwelch
_Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of
individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Arguably a market is
such a form of organization, though it may be more accurate to describe a
market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't
possible._

It's interesting to read this as I'm reading Jonathan Wilson's _Inverting the
Pyramid_ , a tactical history of soccer. One of the great divides is between
teams that adapt their players to a tactical system and teams that adapt their
tactical system to the strengths of their players. One of the interesting
paradoxes is that the Dutch tactic of "Total Football" relied upon the players
on the field literally interchanging positions from front to back, and yet it
was designed in order to suit the mentality and talents of Johan Cruijff.

------
sounds
Might as well mention an earlier paulgraham.com:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html> ("Great Hackers") - here's a tiny summary
that misses a lot:

    
    
      - Some programmers (using paulgraham's term) are orders of magnitude more
        productive
      - They're often motivated by the tools they get to use
      - They're also motivated by interesting ideas/challenges

------
6ren
> It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points by
> accident.

The paragraph following sounds plausible, but I've never heard of this
resulting in a successful product for a company. The closest I can think of is
gmail - but that was in google's officially sanctioned 20% time. Examples
anyone?

~~~
jroll
I hit most of the 8 points when I wrote a mobile app in my free time as an
intern. It provides remote monitoring of our hybrid battery lab (we staff one
shift, test 24/7). It's not a product, per say, but our lead test engineers
use it daily. :)

~~~
arnoooooo
Just FYI, it's "per se", not "per say" : latin for "by itself".

