Quotes from Paul Graham

One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.

GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI's list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.

Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.

The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean "outsource" in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)

In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well.

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.