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well, I personally would like a feature on Reddit where if "Joel Spolsky" is mentioned in any article that I just don't see it. The guy bores me so so much.

I got the impression that painting is nothing like hacking because one gets you laid and the other doesn't. Now let's hear it from Paul Graham. Are you just gonna sit there and take that?

I get the feeling that a lot of people who diss JS have never seen the field from the side of hiring people, with tight budgets -- aka the real world. As an employer, you have significant challenges in getting the people you want, especially if you're a small company. Big companies can get whoever they want, by simple virtue of the Law of Big Numbers. When you can't afford to make a "mistake" upon hiring, you want to be able to find that ideal candidate. For a startup, which is where JS' experience derives, what you're working on is probably so far left-field that whatever "practical" experience your candidate has, they're going to need to learn a crap-load at your place before they're useful. For that particular situation, the thing you want above all else is the ability to learn, which a good working knowledge of things like pointers and CS theory is a good indicator of. Again, this is all predicated on small firm, doing something unusual.

It is said that a good mathematician sees analogies between things. A great mathematician sees analogies between analogies. There is something creative and imaginative which is the mark of all that is great in their trade. The guy's point of view of painting is so low that he concludes that Picasso was worrying about the same things as he is?

like the point about assembly language (just one example).

education in hard concepts is not as important as education in relevant concepts.

Argh.. killed my last comment accidentally. As a practicing engineer, I find the knowledge gained when I used log tables (in high school) of great importance. I use approximations based on logs very often in my work. Do they teach the use of log tables anymore? If not, then should I complain about the calculator kids who can't understand it when I say the signal is 3dB lower, or don't understand the concept of the log-amp?

Drinking has a way of catching up to you, I suppose...

It is possible that the thrust of Paul Graham's argument was not that hackers are like painters in any literal sense, but that it is inaccurate to look at programmers as engineers(in the blueprints and slide-rule sense). Painting is merely a handy analogy. The fact that Graham is interested in painting(not entirely untalented as well), and knows something of its history (maybe not everything) certainly gives him enough authority to say 'hey, these things are not so different.' I have no problem believing that there is overlap between Paul Graham's painting-mode and Paul Graham's hacking-mode, and am glad for the insights he offers regarding the creative process in general. It can be a bit annoying when people from the 'hard' sciences start talking about the Art of their practice. In my experience, this usually results from a confusion between beauty/elegance and Art at large. The last 150 years have served as a pretty strong argument that beauty != Art, and its no wonder that some people would find it difficult to consider merge-sort (or even viaweb) in the same light as Guernica. However, by the same token, artists have a habit of intentionally mysticizing their work. Judging from the superficial beauty and elegance of the author's work I would say his process, all bohemian orgies aside, has a lot more in common with engineering than he would like to admit.

And by "talent", you mean "extraordinary amounts of free time", they sure... There is somethign fascinating about photorealism, but is there really nothing better to spend your time on?

This guy is whining because no one reads his blog. Boo hoo. I'll try to help that trend continue. -1

Great blog article. Funny and true.

...or you could just disable autorun permanently...or just not buy copy-protected CDs at all which is probably much better.

We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects -- Joel Spolsky I think this is a much more matching analogy. Being programming a creative activity of course some analogy exists with painters too, but there is a deep difference as architects have to be creative under a lot of constraints, from the gravity force to space. This is also true for programmers, but I think it's not the same for painters unless they choose to paint in a very specific way. Sometimes it's said that the real creative moment of an architect is not while he is designing something, but when he builds his own "architectural system". To design something is then the application of such a system: still a creative activity, but not the most important part. It seems like that it's true for programming too. You are creative when you try to solve a given specific problem with the tools you have, but your best effort is when you try to build these tools in a generic way in your head, when you find new systems to describe problems. As this appears to be (to me at least) not as true as it is for programming and architecture if applied to painting, this is somewhat a (not very objective maybe) proof that painting and programming isn't the best match for an analogy.

I really don't understand governments. Why can't they simply work with the money they got and split it between the departments that need money? Sure, that means you can't wage war every few years and make tax-cuts to win the next election...

System Shock 2, PC Transport Tycoon, PC Baldur's Gate 1+2, PC

You should try it and find out ;)

I think the point was not Java vs Lisp or something like it.It was about how its difficult to test someone's CS concepts using java..For example a whole array of complex and tricky C style string manipulation stuff like strncmp and strcpy cant be asked to someone who thinks java.lang.Utils.String are only way to manipulate strings!

I guess there would be some photograph on the page if any of it was real. But seeing only drawings I think it's just a funny speculation about what _could_ be done.

Yeah, **losing** money. I think the internet will be very important in rectifying the annoying music situation. This is because the internet allows everyone to be involved, it removes barriers to finding new music. I think it will be more and more embraced by artists resulting in an overall rise in the accessibility of quality music. I don't say that it will raise the quality of music, because I believe there is already a whole lot of high quality stuff out there, it just is not being exposed. I think the trend is already starting, it will just gain momentum. As more people realize they can cheaply publish to the web, more will. This results in a huge amount of stuff being available. The great thing about the internet is that quality things always rise to the top through word of mouth.

Jesus did not invent the religion - the religion invented Jesus. Check out http://jesusneverexisted.com/ , for example.

5 and 8 are not entirely true, afaik. 5: "Reduce the number of local variables to make sure each can have it's own register." This was the case a long time ago, but compilers can figure out register dependencies sufficiently that trying to work for this tip is simply going to convolute your code. 8: "Pass anything over 4 bytes by reference." This is usually true but keep in mind that each access to a variable passed by reference will incur a pointer dereference. There is a tradeoff -not a hard and fast rule.

End of Internet predicted, film at 11.

I study at the Delft University of Technology (the netherlands). The whole works is taught here in the CS department: A lot of java, sure, but there's a course on 68k assembler, CaML and prolog are covered, as are the basics of LISP, and C++ is used in a major computer graphics project, with a slew of pointers to boot. And yet 99% of all students who get their degree here can't program worth a damn. Over half is a raving lunatic for their own language (usually C. Suggesting (insert any language here) is the only language you ever need to learn, and that all other languages, by virtue of not being (insert any language here) suck, is obviously a clear sign you don't get it)... and the rest run for cover the moment you dare speak the words 'programming!'. Or, in short: Spolsky's full of it by empirical proof. It's not what you teach, it's how you do it.

Some of these are misguided to say the least, like adjusting structure sizes to powers of two or avoiding local variables. Besides that they don't mention the most common low level optimisation mistakes people do: not writing cache friendly code and thinking memory allocation is cheap. Also, any article on optimisation that doesn't begin with "Profile first!" shouldn't be trusted ;-)

the best way to optimize any code is to profile, profile, profile, and then *think* about what the profiling data says. try to find a better data structure, in order to pre-calculate whatever can be, and to minimize data structure traversals. try to memoize variables and expression values, to minimize re-running code and re-evaluating subexpressions. then think about algorithms, in case you can find a more efficient way of doing whatever you're still doing. only after that should you consider cache friendliness and memory locality.

He's not actually that good, too... there are some very good photorealists who can take a photograph of a human and make an identical painting (one has work in The ART Book), but this guy does semi-realistic ketchup bottles instead. His shadows are wrong.

One of the first people to regard copying as theft, eh?

He deleted all his comments. o_O

I've thought about replying to this article. It's loaded with mistakes. But merely refuting something mistaken doesn't generally produce an interesting essay. So the joke would be on me if I spent time on that instead of exploring some genuinely interesting question. Then instead of merely calling me names this guy would have wasted a week of my life.

I've also compared programmmers to architects, in other essays. There are some ways programmers are more like painters, though: for example, programs, like paintings, are all design, whereas buildings are designed by architects and then handed over to builders to build. So you see a lot more rapid prototyping and refactoring in hacking and painting than architecture. An architect has much less ability to change things once construction starts.

if you scroll all the way to the bottom there are other cheatsheets fo javascript, mysql, mod_rewrite, mysql and php.

This shows us how much the web will change writing. I found it very interesting, but no magazine editor would have printed it.

"Do not declare 'just in case' virtual functions" Oh, boy. Way to make sure that whatever benefits inheritance brings are minimized, in the name of premature optimization. I wonder whether this guy is thinking of destructors as "just-in-case" things. I agree with all other comments regarding profiling.

How true. Couldn't have reddit anywhere else ;)

When I first came to America, I found the whole doggy-bag culture very unseemly and would never have dared asking to take the "left-over scraps" home. Now (after living a combined 13+ years in Canada and America) would snub my nose at the blatant waste of *not* taking a doggy bag. I am not sure if this can be attributed to a change in culture, age, or the fact that portions here are so much larger than in Europe... I suspect it has to do with all three with a heavy slant on the latter.

You could ask the waiter to wrap the leftovers up. In restaurants with meal sizes comparable to the US.

I smell photoshop...

If you read this, remember that he's not talking about Common Lisp or Scheme. For example, the ONCE-ONLY macro is not a standard part of CL, but you can get a version which is similar (and doesn't require the &environment passing) from the cl-utilities library, <http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-utilities/>.

"I am on the watch list too. Or rather the name 'Paul Graham' is." That's 'cause you're a dangerous subversive. We've all been warned about people like you, Paul. The most unusual case I ever heard of is the case of the name "Dave Nelson" being mysteriously red-flagged in the (now-defunct) CAPPS II data-mining system. AFAIK, nobody ever figured out why that was, and even the developers of the system didn't know -- or at least didn't admit to knowing. What I found eerie about it was that "Dave" and "Nelson" (as in Rockefeller) were the nicknames for the WTC Twin Towers.

He does have a valid point about the sex. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-1918944,00.html

That's exactly what the article addresses though. Most of the comments here are just re-iterating what JS says as if they hadn't read or understood this article which points out the logical fallacy that Joel has fallen into. It says that while Joel is accusing the Java 'kids' of being Blub programmers, Joel himself is a Blub programmer when looked at from a different perspective. It's a variation on the Paul Graham argument as it is saying that you can move the apex of the programming power scale dependent on the requirements and environment of the day. I like Joel's essays and I'm no Java fan but I do find his emphasis on stuff like pointers a bit strange for a company developing web apps. Surely a high-level approach with emphasis on architecture and RAD are more important - it's why we are seeing the rise of frameworks like Rails.

Very interesting read.

Actually, I think it's more of a light-hearted social commentary. Read the title.

The photographs contained shiny things, glass, liquids, shadows. For a photorealistic painting the photographs these were based on are just fine.

I wonder what we might have seen from Ralph had he been a **[hacker rather than a painter](http://adnam.twenex.org/rd/hackers-and-painters-paul-graham)**..

A new headset accessory for the iPod projects video played off it on to a screen smaller than a quarter and is mounted in front of one eye. Its makers say this creates the illusion of watching a 105 inch screen from a distance of 12 feet.

I agree with the article. Pointers and recursion seem to be randomly picked. There are much harder programming concepts like coroutines and continuations. And they *are* useful in the real world for certain tasks, but you can't see that if you don't already understand the concepts. I think the problem with teaching them is the limited real-world examples that are usually demonstrated... I think event-driven programming versus the old console-style UI is a good showcase for coroutines, and continuations can be demonstrated building on coroutines in the context of web development. Has anybody written this tutorial?

I would argue that ability to learn is very similar to the ablity to deal with a novel situation, which can and should be tested on the interview.

I hear Stroustrup is working on Ook++.

22 Finalists - Vote for your favorite of 2005. The photos are almost mesmerizing.

Well, sorry, but for me, CS courses are about making the programmer's life easy -- and *not* about making the life of the recruiter easy. If I can't tell a bright person from a not-so-bright one, that means I'm just crap at hiring. It does *not* mean universities are crap at teaching. Moreover, in his essay, JS keeps complaining about crappy recruiters "who use grep to evaluate résumés" and hire crappy programmers as a result. This one really bothers me, for two reasons: 1. If hiring crappy programmers is as simple as using grep, then why doesn't Joel just use grep *himself* to sort them out? 2. Hiring brilliant programmers *must* be hard. Orelse everyone will be able to hire them and Joel will lose his competitive advantage. I really think Joel is becoming a bit crotchety (as he himself admits). I remember how back in the 90's everyone complained about how the universities treat CS as abstract *science* and do not teach you jack about actual *programming*, i.e. working for a real company in the real world. Now, as universities start teaching people the stuff they'll most probably need to actually pay they bills, now that they start (or continue?) teaching programming languages that are actually used in the industry, now those *very same* people start telling us how much better the old days were. C'mon, face it, the need for Scheme applications is not exactly rising. Sure, I get your point, learning Scheme or Lisp or SML will make you a better programmer in any language, including Java. But that's like saying that studying physics will make you a better driver. It surely will, but most pizza-delivering companies simply don't require their drivers to hold a Ph.D. in physics, so *why waste your time* studying physics if you could get the job anyway? Tellya what, understanding the Theory of Relativity will make you an *even better* programmer. But does that mean that anyone who doesn't understand the Theory of Relativity is a crappy programmer? Sigh. My biggest problem with Joel, however, is his whining about > CS graduates who are simply not smart enough to work > as programmers on anything more sophisticated than > Yet Another Java Accounting Application Sorry, Joel, but such arrogance makes me sick. Last time I checked, you were working on nothing more sophisticated than Yet Another ASP Bugtracking Application. Frankly, you are not in a position to dis anyone. Yes, I understand that your bugtracking software is the cat's whiskers, and you certainly need brilliant people to make it work for left-handed avocado farmers with Polish keyboards -- but again, writing accounting software that works for left-handed avocado farmers with Polish keyboards is *just* as hard and requires *just* as brilliant programmers. And again, if hiring brilliant people becomes easy, then you'll have to *compete* against those grep-using recruiters. That will make your life worse, not better.

Here's an interesting explination of the origin of the term Form follows function and how we mostly misuses it.

In any case, you must admit that he was quite an eloquent speaker compared to recent years. There is no reason to believe that everything a politician says during any public event necessarily coincides with his own beliefs. The speech is only a tool to convince voters that they are on the same side, and his ability to deliver an intelligible response is noteworthy.

Resell logo design services!

I'd be more impressed with this site if the guy's CSS/javascript (I'm not going to bother checking which one) didn't break my scrollbar.

This is spam. It's about time reddit had a way for users to mark stuff as spam...

Why is this spam? It was useful for me ...

its a joke obviously. Nobody but a complete muppet would bid for a piece of a site which is yesterdays news....would they ?

It's amazing how awful this is. Longhorn will be 100GB?!

lame ...

I don't know if it is fuNNy because I cannot open the link.

Yeah but there were no comments then so it wasn't half as much fun to watch. :)

You might even say it was an endless *font* of movie fonts

On a more serious note: entomologists practice insect fixation quite often in their labs :->

Edward Tufte might have been more boisterous than this guy, but said it better, too. If you have to make a PowerPoint presentation, make sure you're conveying real information, and not boiling it down to nothing.

A really nice list of color palette generation and modification tools for web and elsewhere

Not to "defend" Italy at every cost, but here a lot of people work Saturday. A more informative stat should show the number of working days for year, or better the number of working hours for year (If I remember exactly in France many people work 36 hours).

The tenses are all wrong - all wrong! "Thou shalt not seek" not "Thou shalt not seeketh."

There's a few more than those listed under his "Cheat Sheets" category: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/

A few Free Good Quality Anti Spyware and Anti Virus Programs - The Overview is geared towards Newer computer users.

For all those repressed idiots (whos comments seem to have kindly been deleted???) here are two points: - You think prostitution is evil per se? If this is a religious notion, here is a little fact: Judah (of the Bible) hired what he thought was a prostitute. He is, according to the same Bible, the projenitor of the Kings of Israel (prostitution IS forbidden by Jewish law, but is permitted to non-Jews. Even the Jewish forefathers are treated as non-Jews before Moses delivered the goods) - You having sex with a disabled person is degrading to a woman and is only done for money? FWY, Bertrand Russell's mother had mercy sex with a disabled person (with his father's consent). I do not think it was done for money.

so good information

Minus the added commentary, anyone believing in God should follow these as well. And as for this comment: /The Ten Commandments have been with us for more than two millennia yet murder, cruelty, thievery, racism, ethnic hatred and religious strife is just as much, if not more, a part of our everyday lives as it ever was./ No matter what we replace them with, we will always find more of the same. Because, we are human.

That's pretty much the idea of athiesm, isn't it? We, as human beings, must acknowledge and accept the flaws of human nature and should be responsible for our own actions, regardless of the religious culture with which we are presented.

Level: 4, Score: 27 Before I gave up.

Obviously these rules were not inspired by any sort of higher being.

Wired follow up: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,61091,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

shimomura deserves some hate

I got the first 7 right and last 5 wrong. Hmmm...

I got to level 5, 63 points. Kinda boring.

Though I know that it doesn't belong in the top list or anything, one game that long had a special place in my heart was Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages Yes, I know many people don't like it, and that it's very buggy to say the least, but, at least for me, it definately got the atmosphere right. Given that the company (Inscape) imploded a while back, and I don't even know who currently holds the rights for the game, I doubt a sequel will be seen for it, probably would be a very limited market for it even if, but....

Why the hell does it have to be redesigned? Pick a whopping great Zippo and reuse the dang blang thing...

Good article, but it has been posted before... http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php

The Japanese one is obviously counting public holidays (there's almost one a month) as there's no way they get 25 days of annual leave to use a year. More like about 10 days of annual leave.

More than defense, this article needs a reality check. No one I know here in northern Italy gets that much vacation - my wife's parents both work in "state jobs" and certainly get a lot of vacation, probably a month, all things considered, but not the month and a half that these statistics suggest. And then we come to the other reality: not many people my age (30) have the sorts of jobs that let you get even that month of vacation. At most, you might get a month of unpaid leave in August when everything shuts down. This is the flip side of Italy's social model: it's very hard to fire people once they are entrenched with full fledged contracts, so employers do what they can to avoid hiring people that way. The result being is that you get some sort of half-baked position that's neither here nor there, often without some of the benefits like the month of vacation. Something else that's interesting that these stats dont' really show is that a large portion of Italy takes their vacations in the same month - August - when much of northern Italy shuts down. I view that as being more harmful to productivity than long vacations, because even those who want to work, can't. And I don't relish the idea of giving up crowded, busy cities to go to crowded, busy, pricey beach towns myself!

I love Feynman stories, he's such a character.

The Brazilian one is quite correct. If you're a properly registrated employee, you have 30 days of paid vacations per year. I'm surprised about how short are the US vacations.

Twice. Search on "connection machine". I posted the first article about 2 months ago, and was amused to see it re-posted about a month ago. So -- is this a problem? How to solve it automagically? What about scanning the posted page title for similarities to previously posted pages. Then warn the new poster that this might be a re-post. That would miss a lot of cases, but it could have found this one.

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> i simply refuse to allow my personal morality to be predicated on the promise of "heaven" or the threat of "hell". thats how you prode animals, not humans. That shows a pretty major misunderstanding of Chritianity. My personal morality has nothing to do with the promise or heaven or the threat of hell. It has to do with obeying a living God which is much wiser than myself and has never let me down. I've yet to see a command of Christ that doesn't make sense. It is through my own personal experience that not following the law has only led to hardship for me. It seems to me that many of the commands of the Bible are good for living a better life. I'm glad he had the sense to command me to "love my neighbor as myself", because that in itself sums up any command you could ever make. I also wasn't aware that animals were prodded with promises of heaven and threats of hell. I mean, when I tell my dog to do something and he won't listen, I don't say, "If you don't do this, you are going to doggie hell!" Infact, I don't know anyone that does that. That's kind of weird. ;) > (a religion as nonsensical as christianity). And please be a bit more tactful with your words. I understand why some people are atheists. But to say that Christianity is "nonsensical" because of some misgivings you may have is pretty hard-headed. I will agree, some Christians live a very nonsensical brand of Christianity, but not all do...the the general assumption that being a Christian means that your brain is somehow disabled irks me quite a bit.

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You can't beat the classics. How old is this site - 2001? Still crazy after all these years. Jonah Peretti, the guy who did this, rocks.

-1, mix up real hackers with famous crackers.

There is no doubt that a person can be good or evil (and anything in between) regardless of creed, or lack thereof. The goal of the athiest is simply to question the basic foundations of religion. Clearly, the Bible and its various interpretations are full of inconsistencies and it makes no sense to base further assumptions on a source which cannot withstand rigorous analysis in the first place. If historical context cannot be trusted in determining truth, it must be that a religious belief comes from faith alone. And if it is faith that gives us this strong attachment, what prevents us from simply choosing a different religion, or a different set of beliefs. To the athiest, this is exactly the relevation. Since we are free to believe in whatever we choose, why not believe in ourselves?

One of the point of JS article, IMHO, is that univertsities seem more interested in giving students the knowledge requested from software companies, than teaching the basics like pointers and recursion. In Italy we recently had a reform in universities that goes exactly in this direction: create graduates quickly and with the knowledge requested by the market. These seems to be the only judgement methods for a good university. Having strong basics let a programmer adapt and learn new things easily, and in programming where things change so quickly I find it invaluable.

as a programmer and business analyst, this is superb - made me laugh out loud.

I'm not from the US, but I've heard that their paid leave includes public holidays. On the other hand I've heard that employers are quite open to taking family days off like attending your kid's football game or stuff like that.