Quotes from Paul Graham

Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged.

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it." This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people.

and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So

If you'll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don't know where your ideas are coming from, you're probably imitating an imitator.

So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly.

Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

And the reason everyone doesn't use Listp is that programming languages are not merely technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes slower.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from.

If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software

You can't let the suits make technical decisions for you.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

If you start a startup, don't design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow.

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn't, that's not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.

Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it."1