Paul Graham's essays are on my short list of things to re-read periodically. I just got finished reading his essay, «The Other Road Ahead», which is a long, but inciteful and well-documented version of Bucky Fuller's dictum[1] tuned to the software industry.
Paul's stories revolve around one of three main themes: his experiences at Viaweb (the company he built on Common Lisp and sold to Yahoo to become Y! Stores), programming language design (and other topics related to Common Lisp), and reasons why the top tier of hackers are wildly more productive than all other programmers. This story is a blend of all three themes.
Much of what Paul is writing about here should be well-known by anyone in the industry: desktop apps are (mostly) dead, and web apps are the way to go for a lot of reasons: they're a huge lever, good for the user, easy on the programmer, and mostly outside of Microsoft's sphere of control. What I found most interesting about this little story isn't the slightly dated nature of it (the story of Viaweb occurred in the Web's golden era), but the undercurrent of optimism that Paul has infused into his writing. It's not boring, regurgitated hype, but a grounded, almost factual account of the factors at work behind software development in the industry today, and why a small group of strong hackers with a good idea are favored over pretty much anyone else.
[1]: Fuller's Dictum: Do what you love, and the money will follow.
Are you sure "Do what you love and the money will follow" is from Buckminster Fuller? I googled for its source without success. It's the title of a book by Marsha Sinetar. I have it on a card on my office bulletin board, and its source is only given as "a midwestern teacher".
In the version I have, the next sentence is, "Do what you hate and you'll be like the rest of us." I like it a lot.
Re:Source of quotation?
ziggy on 2003-03-05T00:17:20
No, but I've heard quite a number of his acolytes attribute it to him. That, and almost all (non-normative) references to it that I've seen for it lead back to him. If he didn't come up with that line, he certainly popularized it among a random circle of people.Are you sure "Do what you love and the money will follow" is from Buckminster Fuller?:-)
Re:You know what would be cool?
Matts on 2003-03-04T18:23:43
With ASP.net IE already has live date controls, and it down-translates to HTML for other browsers automatically. Kinda cool, in a very microsoftish manner.
