Hackers not in the Cathedral

 I think the success of modern hackers is just another example of the sort of entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking that is present in American culture compared to other cultures, especially European cultures. While Europe has had some notable startups (Skype, others probably), they pale in comparison to the amount of American startups (even Silicon Valley on its own). Part of that is the fact that America more so than other countries rewards risk taking and starting your own business. Part of it is boring and somewhat legal in nature - it is a lot easier to start a company in America, and regulations are very favorable compared to those in other countries. However, a large part of it is cultural in nature. It’s often said that Americans live to work and Europeans work to live, and studies looking at average hours worked by country bear this out. Obviously starting up a company requires massively more work than working at an already established company, so Americans clearly have a...

Language is an incredibly important tool in all facets of life. Different languages have different ways of expressing concepts such as numbers or the future, all of which affect how we think about these concepts. In some languages, the future is described more in vague terms rather than exact terms, which can lead to differences in how cultures that speak that language view the future. In written language, we can see that the Arabic script is far more efficient than the Roman script in terms of numbers, which is the reason we now use Arabic numbers instead of Roman numerals. The same applies to programming languages. Choosing the programming language that you are going to use when starting a project is one of the most important design choices you could make. You must consider the efficiency of the programmer in addition to the efficiency of the program. For a small script that is unlikely to see use past a very few people, it is perfectly fine to choose a language like Python that is ...

Paul Graham sees hacking (and by extension hackers) as closer to an artform than anything else. Paul describes hackers as makers, people who are creating something beautiful, not necessarily something new and original, but something beautiful whether in output or in design. I believe his definition is compatible and in fact fits in very well with Levy’s description of hackers. The hacker ethic even mentions that computers can be used for art and beauty! Additionally, from the stories we have read of early hackers trying to impress other hackers through code shaving to tales of hackers choosing to program an astronomically accurate star chart for the background of a game, we can see that beauty has been part of hacking since it’s very beginning. There are certainly diminishing returns to code shaving - once you’ve reached the point where you are spending hours upon hours to try and shave off a line or two of code, you’re wasting your time if you purely think of your efforts as being to...