Is Paul Graham’s version of a hacker compatible with Steven Levy’s description?

Paul Graham and Steven Levy, while their descriptions might be different are really talking about the same group of people when they refer to “Hackers.” Levy’s hackers are people who follow his six tenants of the hacker ethic. On the other hand Graham presents an idea of hackers as those even in High School as people who have a bigger picture…who can see the world in a broader sense than everyone else. In “Hackers and Painters” Graham likens Hackers to artisan; just as painters paint beautiful pictures or architects create beautiful building programmers or hackers create beautiful software. And they way in which they create the software…the innards of the software is also beautiful. This idea especially stands out to me as being compatible with Levy’s description, just think back to MIT when all of the hackers were constantly trying to improve their programs make them the best they can be…Graham is basically saying the same thing here.

Even in Graham’s description of the word “Hacker” it refers to those that are “American” in the sense that they break the rules for the sake of intellectually curiosity agrees with the Levy. In the 60’s at MIT all of the hackers were constantly breaking into the offices of administrators constantly wanting more information because information could help them build better things. Graham acknowledges this also as he points out that closed source software leads not ideas that are not the “best” and the “best” ideas lead to the best results.

One of the points that Graham makes in his essays is that because Hackers are “makers” that want to make “beautiful software” they inherently need to have a “day job” and a “side job” in order to be fulfilled in life. He makes the argument that no software development job will be able to fulfill the hackers need to make unless that job is in a startup or similar company. I think this particular argument is a little bit misguided I think a lot of good hackers can be happy working in a company where they are making software that benefits and helps the world. On the other hand Graham points out that software development is a lot like being a painter. You write your first iteration of the program and its like making a sketch, then you refine and debug your program and thats like making the final painting on canvas. This is an idea that I think rings true for a lot of people studying computer science. While Graham points out that the theory of computation might be important it is not essential to making good software save for a few key components.

Overall Graham and Levy’s ideas of hackers I think are very comparable with each other Levy has his six tenants and it is easy to see how Graham’s ideas lend themselves to those tenants. Me personally, reading Graham’s essays really helped me to see that while a Hackers might be that MIT student in their hacker utopia, or one of the hardware hackers that worked out of their garage, it can also be a label that I identify with. Writing code for me has always been an experience that gave me excitement and made me feel like I was in my element. Comparing programming with painting and other maker hobbies makes this feeling make a ton of sense to me. No wonder I love doing it so much…I am going out every day writing code that is beautiful and that will be useful and intuitive for the user. It is a constant never ending battle to be better…to Write Code Not Tragedies.