Paul Graham - Hacking and Painting

[gusl]

Paul Graham - Hacking and Painting

Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your mind. Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that's very short.

Comments

[evan.livejournal.com]

many people (in particular, the lispers) confuse static typing and explicit typing and/or have never seen static typing outside of popular languages like C.

but that's also because most people choose which side of an issue they're on and then try to find support for their decision, instead of the reverse. :)