【《Hackers & Painters 》黑客与画家摘录】第二章精要摘录

第二章：Hackers and Painters

• A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of.

• The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

• In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software

• As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

• When I say that the answer is for hackers to have day jobs, and work on beautiful software on the side, I’m not proposing this as a new idea. This is what open source hacking is all about.

• When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can’t do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own

• Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers

• Most hackers don’t learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn by writing programs of their own at age thirteen

• To a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made

• Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs—not just at what they do, but at the source code. One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.

• Another example we can take from painting is the way that paintings are created by gradual refinement. Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Gradually the details get filled in. But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in x-rays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.

• Hacking should work this way too. It’s unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. You’re better off if you admit this up front, and write programs in a way that allows specifications to change on the fly