Paul Graham

I enjoy essays that are well-written and though provoking. And I'm trying to learn from the masters. Paul Graham strikes me as such a master. In this article I share some information on Paul's work and his essays.

I first came to know of Paul Graham while hacking Common Lisp.

Paul is an accomplished hacker and has impressive credentials in the Lisp community.  His macros are widely used and his book "On Lisp" is essentially required reading. 

Paul is also known for building a company (along with Robert Morris) that was eventually sold to Yahoo for about $50M.  The software that Paul and Robert wrote that made the company, Viaweb, such an impressive company was actually written in Common Lisp.  So naturally, every other Lisp hacker, myself included, points to Viaweb as some kind of existence proof that we aren't completely insane.

Paul has also written about about another language I enjoy hacking in -- Python.  In his essay 'The Python Paradox' Paul writes:

In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.

I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.

Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.

Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. But there is a kind of selection going on here too: they're exactly the companies programmers would most like to work for. Google, for example. When they advertise Java programming jobs, they also want Python experience.

You can find Paul's published essays on his website.

In closing, I have to say that I find it more than a bit creepy that when I'm working in Python and googling for information to keep getting AdSense hits from Google telling me about how their Kirkland office is looking for Python programmers.  The really scary part was that if I didn't already have a great gig going on, I'd probably give them a call!
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tags: plone|  problem-solving|  python|  software-development