Quotes About Hobbyists

You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.

The comic hobbyists world is so passionate about the details and the lore and the more you get into that, the more interesting it is for you.

And commercialize was the word: Whereas much early software had been developed for the sheer challenge and shared like some favorite toy, the Gates/Allen edition of BASIC—the first personal computer language—was from the outset a business proposition, something people were supposed to pay for. That idea did not sit well with the pioneer hobbyists whose lame little machines needed BASIC to become something more than high-tech doorstops.

He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun ruined forever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that they'd missed their main chance.

Gates's "Letter to Hobbyists," complaining about the unauthorized sharing of Microsoft BASIC, asked in a chiding way, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" Torvalds found that an odd outlook. He and Gates were from two very different cultures, the communist-tinged radical academia of Helsinki versus the corporate elite of Seattle. Gates may have ended up with the bigger house, but Torvalds reaped antiestablishment adulation.

dilettantes

Rail attendants dismiss excited train hobbyists as "foamers" (foaming at the mouth as they board their choo-choos).