>here just aren't very many hackers who are also painters.
I'd raise the hand for, as you say, "for some definition of" hacker, painter, writer and musician. And for any of slacker :-) I only program now, though.
Edit: oops! half the commentary disappeared before. I was going to say that painting (and composing music and writing) is really alike to programming, IMHO at least. I haven't read Paul Graham's book so I don't know if it has the same things that I feel alike. But the fact that there is a visible result and that result must "work" and the means are mostly a thought product, it's all the same. And there are also other similarities of the joy that I feel when doing any of these things that I couldn't express easily.
You would think that what means that the result "works" is different, that it's easier to have objetive measure of a working program than a "working painting". In fact it's not very clear in most companies. If the sales dept. can fool one customer to buy some crap (or undone) software for a fortune, that'd be "working". Not better than "art market".
I'd raise the hand for, as you say, "for some definition of" hacker, painter, writer and musician. And for any of slacker :-) I only program now, though.
Edit: oops! half the commentary disappeared before. I was going to say that painting (and composing music and writing) is really alike to programming, IMHO at least. I haven't read Paul Graham's book so I don't know if it has the same things that I feel alike. But the fact that there is a visible result and that result must "work" and the means are mostly a thought product, it's all the same. And there are also other similarities of the joy that I feel when doing any of these things that I couldn't express easily.
You would think that what means that the result "works" is different, that it's easier to have objetive measure of a working program than a "working painting". In fact it's not very clear in most companies. If the sales dept. can fool one customer to buy some crap (or undone) software for a fortune, that'd be "working". Not better than "art market".