This is an astonishingly good collection of essays. In lesser hands, any of the 15 essays here could have been a book by itself --- each packs more content than you can find in a typical one idea business book, or a typical one technology book for geeks. Yet his book is not dense or difficult: Graham's graceful style is a pleasure to read.

But what is it? Is it a business book, or a technical book? A bit of both actually, with a pinch of social criticism thrown in. There are essays on business --- particularly startups --- and essays on programming languages and how to combat spam, and one delightful one on the difficulty being a nerd in American public schools.

My favorite essay of the 15 --- and picking a favorite is itself a challenge --- is called "What you can't say". It is about heresy, not historical Middle Ages burned-at-the-stake heresy, but heresy today in 2004. And if you believe nothing is heretical today, that no idea today is so beyond the pale that it would provoke a purely emotional reaction to its very utterance, then read some of the other reviews. Graham's idea is not that all heresies are worth challenging publicly, or even that all heresies are wrong, but merely that there is value is being aware of what is heretical, so one can notice where the blind spots are.

Astonishingly good.

Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of Paul Graham's writing and works. I've been reading his blog for ages, and am a somewhat obsessive reader of his website Hacker News.

I recently decided to purchase and read Graham's book, "Hackers & Painters", to casually read through some of his favorite essays. This book is comprised of 15 of Graham's essays pulled from his blog, which he updates several times a year. The topics of his essays are diverse, but all represent a hacker's point of view.

What makes this book worth reading is that you get inside of Paul Graham's mind. He has an amazingly clear writing style (one that I am extremely fond of), and is able to walk you through his thoughts and arguments in a clear manner.

If you're at all interested in entrepreneurship, technology, or programming, I would give this book a read. It can be read casually in a day or so, and will make you think deeply about the topics discussed for weeks afterwards.

Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters" is a collection of separate articles from Paul. The articles are well written and funny, though I frequently did not agree with the content. Since one of the earlier articles was on censorship, I'd say... that was probably the intention :)

The first article is triggered by Pauls growing up and asks why nerds are unpopular when you are younger. He explores memories of his childhood and tries to clarify them. He continues with a article after which the book is named. He explains that he has *some* education in painting and explores the similarity between hacking and painting.

The next couple chapters are an attack to taboos in general. What can we say? Why can we say that? And he claims that hackers are more comfortable breaking taboos, breaking the rules.

In the article "The road ahead" he is making predictions related to web-based server software, of which some are insightful (or were insightful). He claims that server-based software will be the future and the recent years have certainly shown that to be true.

The next couple of articles relate to capitalism and I did disagree with a lot of the statements he made in here. Though, often his points are carefully crafts.. here I found them simplistic. It annoyed me and even thought about stop reading it. The well-written-ness made me continue though.

The middle of the book contains an article about spam. This one doesn't fit well in the book and could have better left out, in my opinion.

The last articles in the book relate to programming languages and were fun to read. Paul is a serious Lisp fan and tries to argue about programming languages in such a way that it always supports his chose of lisp. He does make a couple of good points.

All in all, I've enjoyed reading "Hackers & Painters". Its an easy read with interesting strong opinions from Paul. I'd rate it between 3 and 4 stars, mainly because the amount of learning is not high. Though, I remember some articles got me laughing out loud, so decided to go for a 4. Worth reading if you like strong opinions relate to hacker cultures.

H & P has one of the highest insights-per-page densities of any book I've read. Graham writes essays not to describe or sell ideas but to discover them. Writing is his vehicle for coming up with new ways of looking at things, and we get to go along for the ride.

Graham has a knack for distilling the essence of things: high schools as holding pens, hacking as a craft, money as a way to move wealth, programming languages as chairs, etc. Two questions seem to drive Graham's writing process: What is the broadest thing that can be said about X without being false? And how can I say it in the simplest manner possible? It's this joint process of abstraction (of content) and simplification (of form) that results in really good essays.

If you are curious about the world and like surprising ideas, then you should probably read this book.

P.S. if you enjoy the essays, definitely check out the endnotes. To simplify his essays, Graham buries a lot of insights at the end.

While it's possible that Mr. Graham didn't start a business and sell it for (I imagine) a mint to Yahoo! just so he would have time to edify me with his writings, it has worked out that way. I bought this book as much because I owe him for all the information I've picked up off his website (and the two Lisp books I bought used, including a PRISTINE copy of On Lisp that somebody sold at half.com for $25.00) as because I thought I would find the subject matter of particular interest. But what do I know? It's all fascinating. And well-written, too, if you can forgive Graham's habit of beginning sentences with "and."

Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." Mr. Graham has taken to time to make this book shorter. I highly recommend to to geeks, nerds, and even unscarred smart people everywhere.

Hackers and painters is a book written by Paul Graham who ran a startup in the 1990’s which was later sold to Yahoo. He is now running Y Combinator.

Hackers and painters is a book which reads like a collection of random essays. The first few chapters is about the start of computing and about childhood while later chapters are about both starting a startup and socioeconomic policies. The last chapters are about programming languages where he strongly argues for lisp.

Anyone so have read one of his essays know how well articulate Graham can be and the this book is no exception. The chapters themselves are really well written even though he sometimes argues unconvincingly.

In the end I did not feel that this book was anything else than a collection of essays and while some are interesting, it does not save the entire book. A stronger focus and some narrative between the chapters would improve this book immensely.

I'm a devbootcamp alum, and while I was there, surrounded by dozens of super smart people, the majority of them, me included, were strongly agreeing on one point:

No matter if they were already successful or not in a career before, in a past life, or just trying to figure out what to do in their life, Paul Graham was the one that made us make the decision about going into programming. He writes so well, and knows so much, that it's easy for him to convince you that programming is the way to go (if your meant to be of course).

And I'm sure that this books can be related to any other career you're looking into.

a must read.

I’m an old guy excuse the expression who started with Fortran and APL, hacked a bit in lisp and thinks that JavaScript is underrated but still way too much work and arguably not much better than COBOL

So I’m in total agreement that the less you have to write the better off you are

Ein klassiker

Provides an interesting point of view on the world of computer programming and the requirements for success in general. The writer encourages you to rethink convention on many fronts and uses his own success as evidence to why it must be done.

A little book that has a soul.

You can get really interesting philosophical smell from this writing.

The autor really loves what he does and gives you real high level knowledge from his vast and deep experience in computing.

Really good for picking chapters in a random manner.

I loved reading it.

Qual a semelhança entre programadores e pintores? Ambos são criadores. Eles criam coisas a partir de uma visão. Uma mistura de filosofia, tecnologia, visão de mundo e reflexões aleatórias que formam uma obra que tem alma. Alguns capítulos são diretamente para programadores, e nesses eu não tive muito interesse. Mas o outros, amigo... que porrada. Paul Graham sintetiza com clareza assuntos complexos e polêmicos. Conformismo e seus perigos, criação de riqueza, criação de produtos... tudo de um ponto de vista ao mesmo tempo filosófico e prático. Várias vezes terminei de ler um trecho e me vi assim: 🤯 Não fosse pelos capítulos muito técnicos que são 30% do livro, seria possivelmente um dos melhores do ano.

Se você é programador, LEIA, provavelmente vai ser seu livro favorito.

Viaweb社を立ち上げた時の経験やルネサンス期イタリアの歴史を交えながら、ハッカーとはどういう人間か、プログラミング言語の進化、ベンチャー事業を成功させる方法を論じている。

話は大変具体的でわかり易いにもかかわらず、著者の洞察力には圧倒される。

これを読むまでは、LISPなんてただへんてこりんな言語だと思っていたが、見方が変わった。

特に、“dynamic typing”対“static typing”についてはハッカーを科学者ではなく画家と対比して見せたことによって、少なくともアプリケーション寄りのプログラミング言語は、dynamic typingであるべきだということが良く分かった。

しかしながら、LISP言語のもうひとつの強力な機能であるmacroについては、この本を読んだだけではわからなかった。それでもLISPはプログラミング言語進化の本流に違いない。

各章が独立したエッセイなので読みやすい。