Hackers & Painters  (English, Paperback, Graham Paul)

Hackers And Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age provides a different perspective on the world of computers and on the world itself.

Summary Of The Book

 Now, everything, from cars to microwaves, planes to watches are all computerized. Phones have become tiny computers, and everything, including books and magazines are getting digitized. All information is stored in the form of bits and bytes.

Programmers became the new empire builders, creating huge software corporations that dominated the world. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, all of these were all started by programmers. Their products and services have changed the way computers are used.

So, the new world order is ruled by programmers and creators of digital devices. This book, Hackers And Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age seeks to explain that world.

The author has decided to use the word ‘hackers’ to refer to expert programmers. He explains that though the word has some negative connotations, expert programmers like to call themselves hackers. This is because they treasure freedom, the liberty to question everything, including their own creations. He says hackers are like other artists, like painters or writers. They create, and with creativity comes the freedom to explore and think outside traditional confines.

This book contains 15 chapters and a few of them are What You Can't Say, Good Bad Attitude, How to Make Wealth, Taste for Makers, and A Plan for Spam.

Hackers And Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age explains why nerds are unpopular, how computers helped create wealth, how to think heretic thoughts and make use of them, and why breaking the rules sometime pays. Graham says that the world of computers is an intellectual wild west, where there are no set laws and only those who dare, thrive. He discusses why programmers became the super rich of the recent past, and explores the proliferation of programming languages.

Hackers And Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age explains why the author thinks that the world wide web defines the future, why he thinks beauty is important in the design of software, and explores the trends for future programming languages.

About Paul Graham

Paul Graham is an English venture capitalist, programmer, and writer.

Other books by Graham are On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp.

He writes books on programming and programming languages.

Graham was born in Dorset, England, in the year 1964. He graduated from Cornell University with a B.Aa in Philosophy, then earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D from Harvard University, in Applied Sciences. Graham later studied Painting at the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Italy and at the Rhode Island School of Design in the USA. With Robert Morris, he started the first application service provider company (ASP) Viaweb. This service was later taken over by Yahoo! and became the Yahoo Store. Graham has created a LISP dialect known as Arc and also a hypothetical programming language called Blub.