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HACKING_UP_PAINTINGS

                                             August    18, 2010
                                             September 25, 2013
Speaking of the
"renaissance nerd"      RENAISSANCE_NERDS
phenomena...


This brings us to Paul Graham, yet
another interesting, intelligent              PAUL_GRAHAM
fellow who can't write two paragraphs
without hitting something dubious.                   HACKING_GREATNESS

    I feel like I've started                         THE_GREAT_DEBATE
    working over Graham many
    times, but I just get bogged                     LANGUAGES_OF_POWER
    down, there's no end to it.
    He's as bad as Richard                           REAR_VIEW_PIONEER
    Posner, except that I doubt
    he's doing it on purpose.                        FLORENCE


    Many of Paul Graham's essays-- written back
    before he retired to the Venture Capital
    business-- are collected in the volume,
    "Hackers and Painters", and all are            http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
    available on-line.


    Paul Graham has some interest in painting--
    I gather in the classical style-- and some
    interest in programming, and has concluded
    that there then must be some deep connection
    between hackers and painters: they like           The ultimate put-down
    to make stuff.  And they need to know some        of what Graham has to
    stuff.                                            say about painting:
                                       
         Myself, I'm the kind of                      "Dabblers and Blowhards"
         fellow who would like to                     http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
         think that there is indeed            
         some deep connection between          
         the technical and the                 
         artistic, but the fact that          The "Hackers and Painters"
         they both have creative              essay does however deal with
         aspects does not strike me as        a number of themes much like
         all that amazing an insight.         ones I've dealt with, e.g.
                                              the odd pretensions of
                                              "Computer Science", which is
                                              clearly not a science, and
                                              so tangentially related to
                                              to math that the work of
                                              the mathematicians who call
                                              themselves Computer Scientists
                                              is often only of minor interest
                                              to people working on computer
                                              software.







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