What You'll Wish You'd Known
January 2005
(I wrote this talk for a
high school.  I never actually
gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious.
What will you say to high school students?  So I asked them, what
do you wish someone had told you in high school?  Their answers
were remarkably similar.  So I'm going to tell you what we all wish
someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high
school: what you want to do with your life.  People are always
asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer.
But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter.   They want
to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to
get you talking.  They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab
in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd
say that my first priority was to learn what the options were.  You
don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work.  What you
need to do is discover what you like.  You have to work on stuff
you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you
like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get
an accurate picture of most jobs.  Being a doctor is not the way
it's portrayed on TV.  Fortunately you can also watch real doctors,
by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is
doing them yet.  Most of the work I've done in the last ten years
didn't exist when I was in high school.  The world changes fast,
and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up.  In such a
world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard
Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your
dreams.  I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it,
because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you
made early on.  The computer world has a name for this: premature
optimization.  And it is synonymous with disaster.  These speakers
would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized.  Don't think that
you can't do what other people can.   And I agree you shouldn't
underestimate your potential.  People who've done great things tend
to seem as if they were a race apart.  And most biographies only
exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude
biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how
the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems
like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding
of some innate genius.   In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen
year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem
impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought.  If they were just like us, then
they had to work very hard to do what they did.  And that's one
reason we like to believe in genius.  It gives us an excuse for
being lazy.  If these guys were able to do what they did only because
of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our
fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius.  But if you're
trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't
give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do."
But it needs to be cut still further.  There is
some
variation
in natural ability.  Most people overestimate its role, but it does
exist.  If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition
was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can
do anything if you really try. [2]
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone
else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate
your abilities."  But as so often happens, the closer you get to
the truth, the messier your sentence gets.  We've taken a nice,
neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle.  It
doesn't make a very good speech anymore.  But worse still, it doesn't
tell you what to do anymore.  Someone with your abilities?  What
are your abilities?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction.  Instead
of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be
in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there?
I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future,
but just look at the options available now, and choose those that
will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting
your time.  Work on things that interest you and increase your
options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math
or economics.  Well, math will give you more options: you can go into
almost any field from math.  If you major in math it will be easy
to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics
it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here.  Because a glider doesn't
have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot
of altitude.  If you let yourself get far downwind of good places
to land, your options narrow uncomfortably.  As a rule you want to
stay upwind.  So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give
up on your dreams."  Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though?  Even if math is upwind of economics,
how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out.
Look for smart people
and hard problems.  Smart people tend to clump together, and if you
can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.  But
it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of
faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look
much the same.  The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual
and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders.  But while in some
fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard
ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to
seem as if they're saying something important.  This may seem a
scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified,
in the famous
Social Text
affair.  Suspecting that the papers
published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding
nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of
intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary
theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
Writing novels is hard.  Reading novels isn't.
Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that
something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be
able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard
enough.  There has to be suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think.  What I'm
telling you is that you should worry?  Yes, but it's not as bad as
it sounds.  It's exhilarating to overcome worries.  You don't see
faces much happier than people winning gold medals.  And you know
why they're so happy?  Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy.  Just that some
kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems."  And
you can start today.  I wish I'd grasped that in
high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do.  In the so-called real
world this need is a powerful force.  But high school students
rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do.
When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to
be a high school student.  And so I let my need to be good at what
I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between
high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had
to earn a living.  Wrong.  It's that adults take responsibility for
themselves.  Making a living is only a small part of it.
Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day
job.  I don't mean that I'd slack in school.  Working at something
as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly.  It means not being defined
by it.  I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student,
just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of
himself as a waiter. [3]   And when I wasn't working at my day job
I'd start trying to do real work.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they
nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time.  If
you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most
later, that's probably it. [4]
Some people say this is inevitable — that high school students
aren't capable of getting anything done yet.  But I don't think
this is true.  And the proof is that you're bored.  You probably
weren't bored when you were eight.  When you're eight it's called
"playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing.  And
when I was eight, I was rarely bored.  Give me a back yard and a
few other kids and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now
realize, is that I was ready for something else.  Childhood was
getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends — that you
should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work.
Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake.  You enjoy it more
if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate
cake for every meal.  No matter how much you like chocolate cake,
you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it.  And that's
what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
[5]
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades.  We
have to have
extracurricular activities.
But you know
perfectly well how bogus most of these are.  Collecting donations
for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not
hard.
It's not getting something done.  What I mean by getting something
done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers,
or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to
draw the human face from life.  This sort of thing rarely translates
into a line item on a college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college,
because the people you have to impress to get into college are not
a very discerning audience.  At most colleges, it's not the professors
who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they
are nowhere near as smart.  They're the NCOs of the intellectual
world. They can't tell how smart you are.
The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents
would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't
improve their admissions prospects.  Prep schools openly say this
is one of their aims.  But what that means, if you stop to
think about it, is that they can
hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid
and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he
went to the local public school. [6]
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising
college applicant.  But that means you're designing your life to
satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted
to subverting it.  No wonder you become cynical.  The malaise you
feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco
industry executive feels.  And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do?  What you should not do is rebel.  That's what
I did, and it was a mistake.  I didn't realize exactly what was
happening to us, but I smelled a major rat.  And so I just gave up.
Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's
Notes, it seemed par for the course.  Surely it meant nothing to
get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid.  It was like someone getting fouled
in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the
rules, and walking off the field in indignation.  Fouls happen.
The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool.  Just
keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you.   Yes,
as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is
crap.  And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is
largely a charade.  But like many fouls, this one was unintentional.
[7] So just keep playing.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience.  In either case you let
yourself be defined by what they tell you to do.  The best plan, I
think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector.  Don't just do what
they tell you, and don't just refuse to.  Instead treat school as
a day job.  As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet.  You're done at 3
o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be?  Unless you're Mozart,
your first task is to figure that out.  What are the great things
to work on?  Where are the imaginative people?  And most importantly,
what are you interested in?  The word "aptitude" is misleading,
because it implies something innate.  The most powerful sort of
aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests
are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture
under the name "passion."  I recently saw an ad for waiters saying
they wanted people with a "passion for service."  The real thing
is not something one could have for waiting on tables.  And passion
is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid
curiosity.  Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at
random about everything.  In most adults this curiosity dries up
entirely.  It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always
asking why about everything.  But in ambitious adults, instead of
drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep.  The mud flat morphs
into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play.  For Einstein, relativity wasn't a
book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam.  It was a
mystery he was trying to solve.  So it probably felt like less work
to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it
in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea
that doing great things requires a lot of discipline.  Most subjects
are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that
you can flog yourself through them.  So I was surprised when, early
in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no
self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,
not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same
with all of them.  They have little discipline.  They're all terrible
procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves
do anything they're not interested in.  One still hasn't sent out
his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago.
Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline.  You
probably need about the amount you need to go running.  I'm often
reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it.  And if I don't
run for several days, I feel ill.  It's the same with people who
do great things.  They know they'll feel bad if they don't work,
and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks
to start working.  But once they get started, interest takes over,
and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently
trying to write Great Literature?  Of course not.  He was having
fun.  That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity
about a promising question.   The critical moment for Einstein
was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell
is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it
can take years to figure out what a subject is really about.  To
take an extreme example, consider math.  Most people think they
hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name
"mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H.  Hardy said he didn't like math in
high school either.  He only took it up because he was better at
it than the other students.  Only later did he realize math was
interesting — only later did he start to ask questions instead of
merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a
paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it
interesting.  That's what you need to do: find a question that makes
the world interesting.  People who do great things look at the same
world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's
compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters.  Henry Ford's great question
was, why do cars have to be a luxury item?  What would happen if
you treated them as a commodity?  Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect,
why does everyone have to stay in his position?  Why can't defenders
score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now,
at sixteen?  Work toward finding one.  Great questions don't appear
suddenly.  They gradually congeal in your head.  And what makes
them congeal is experience.  So the way to find great questions is
not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great
discovery shall I make?  You can't answer that; if you could, you'd
have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
take roost.  Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe.
They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys.  So
when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to
notice it.
Put in time how and on what?  Just pick a project that seems
interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
or to answer some question.  Choose a project that will take less
than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
at first.  If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another.  Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one.  (This
could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that
will restrict you or make it seem like work.  Involve your friends
if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes.
Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person),
but secrecy also has its advantages.  There's something pleasing
about a secret project.  And you can take more risks, because no
one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some
goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you
think.  So let the path grow out the project.  The most important
thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you
learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations.  One of the most powerful is
the desire to be better than other people at something.  Hardy said
that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing
about him is that he admitted it.  Another powerful motivator is
the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to.  Closely
related is the desire to do something audacious.  Sixteen year olds
aren't supposed to write novels.  So if you try, anything you achieve
is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing
no worse than expectations.  [8]
Beware of bad models.  Especially when they excuse laziness.  When
I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories
like ones I'd seen by famous writers.  My stories didn't have a lot
of plot, but they were very deep.  And they were less work to write
than entertaining ones would have been.  I should have known that
was a danger sign.  And in fact I found my stories pretty boring;
what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff
like the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers
actually sucked.  Plenty of famous people do; in the short term,
the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame.
I should have been less worried about doing something
that seemed cool, and just done something I liked.  That's the
actual road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is
to find good books.  Most books are bad.  Nearly all textbooks are
bad. [9]  So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever
book on it happens to be closest.  You have to search actively for
the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff.  Instead of
waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers.  It
could be shaped by your own curiosity.  It is for all ambitious
adults.  And you don't have to wait to start.  In fact, you don't
have to wait to be an adult.  There's no switch inside you that
magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some
institution.  You start being an adult when you decide to take
responsibility for your life.  You can do that at any age.  [10]
This may sound like bullshit.  I'm just a minor, you may think, I
have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults
tell me all day long.  Well, most adults labor under restrictions
just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done.  If you
think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is
that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school
kids don't.  That realization hits most people around 23.  But I'm
letting you in on the secret early.  So get to work.  Maybe you can
be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't
how much time you wasted.
Notes
[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate
picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little
autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how
unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"
[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate
the NBA into letting him play.  So far the closest anyone has come
is Secretary of Labor.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what
you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.
Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for
some students to get good grades.  If you treat your classes
as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.
However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to
get into a decent college.  And that
is
worth doing, because
universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these
days.
[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant
things.  And especially about what other people thought of them.
I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what
random people thought of them.  Adults care just as much what other
people think, but they get to be more selective about the other
people.
I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about,
and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me.  The
problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by
accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect
for their judgement.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction.  Without distractions
it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with
it, and you start to feel uncomfortable.  If you want to measure
how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment:
set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think.
You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing
else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,
newspapers, or magazines.  Within an hour most people will feel a
strong craving for distraction.
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools
is to trick admissions officers.  They also generally provide a
better education.  But try this thought experiment: suppose prep
schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001)
negative effect on college admissions.  How many parents would still
send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because
they've learned more,
are
better college candidates.  But
this seems empirically false.  What you learn in even the best high
school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.
Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage,
but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just
that they are within any given college.  That follows necessarily
if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
[7] Why does society foul you?  Indifference, mainly.  There are
simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good.  The air
traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise.
Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take
their customers.  But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it
has no competitors.  High school isn't evil; it's random; but random
is pretty bad.
[8] And then of course there is money.  It's not a big factor in
high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants.  But a
lot of great things were created mainly to make money.  Samuel
Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."
(Many hope he was exaggerating.)
[9] Even college textbooks are bad.  When you get to college,
you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are
not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe.
Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people
who need the money.  It's unpleasant because the publishers exert
so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision
by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing.  This phenomenon
is apparently
even worse
in the production of high school textbooks.
[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults.
I wonder if they'd like it if you did.  You may be loud and
disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.  If you
actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch
of adults had been transposed into your bodies.  Imagine the reaction
of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had
to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go
at a time.  To say nothing of the things you're taught.  If a bunch
of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school,
the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the
rules with the administration.
Thanks
to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell,
Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah
Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa
Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many
others for talking to me about high school.
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Japanese Translation
Russian Translation
Georgian Translation


@KarenAttiah If the oldest example you can find is from 8 years ago, it sounds like the answer is no, they didn't do this during the civil rights movement.

@monicalimco You can get a fairly complete list of things I taught my kids (so far) with a Twitter search: https://t.co/uTILdajeAS

Ugh, this aged horribly well.

Something I taught 15 yo: People are quite willing to admit they're wrong about math, but less willing to as the subjects get softer. And since being right is such an advantage, it's worth stretching the attitude you have toward math as far softward as you can.

@mwseibel Some are the villains though.

@ruddro29 @DrDadabhoy Probably they see my face, notice I'm a white male, and then start making assumptions based on that. They don't have any other evidence, unless they actually looked at my tweets. But they couldn't have done that and thought I was neutral. So it must be my face.

@TIER_ips I learned about the misbehavior of prosecutors after I started paying attention to death penalty cases. It's endemic.

https://t.co/YEFYH5UmN6

@joodalooped The reason I don't is that I know so much more than has been said publicly about this investigation. It was a textbook case of regulators driven by ideology and personal animosity.

@tunguz It's true that wokeness began at universities, but it didn't begin equally in all departments. There are still lots of smart, reasonable people in the other departments, and recently they've started pushing back.

@AndreSobolewski Universities aren't monolithic. They include some of the most reasonable as well as the most unreasonable people. Recently the former have been pushing back, and often succeeding.


@Jason One of Brian's big themes in the talk I described in the founder mode essay was gradually waking up from this hypnotic state, and in his case it took Covid and the threat of bankruptcy to do it.

https://t.co/3hOnlKPhqQ

@Jason You don't have to invent sinister explanations for this. It's very common for young, inexperienced founders to take C-level's execs' word for how things have to be done in what has now become a big company. Especially when they're as convincing as she probably was.

@The_Colonel__ @skdh Was that thing written by Grok? That would be a relief to know if so, because my initial hypothesis was drugs of some sort.

@pourteaux @skdh @elonmusk I did.

@mattyglesias I don't. I think haters are genuinely contemptible people. But I can at least ignore them fairly well by now.

https://t.co/UZYW65HvKc

@EdBIre1 @ColmCasey I have gone there. I've visited John's house twice.

Corollary: If you're an opportunist, don't compete with people working on their life's work. They'll inevitably wear you out and defeat you in the end.

Most people who attack or compete with you will be opportunists. So if the thing you're working on is your life's work, all you have to do is keep going, and eventually they'll drop away. Once several generations of them have dropped away you'll even stop caring about new ones.

@hristozaykov John looks like he has just stepped off the set of The Brady Bunch.

@cremieuxrecueil A more direct way of putting it would be "This trend stopped in 2020."


@eshear You'd see more good stuff if tweets with links weren't deprioritized.

@Benji_Fernandes @garrytan @ycombinator That's 5300 startups, not founders. The number of founders will be roughly 2x that.

@spenserskates @wadechambers I don't think this is right. Sometimes merely seeing a problem is the hardest part. For example: is the force that keeps planets in their orbits the same as the one that made that apple fall?

@ArmandDoma This was a clumsy move. Not masterful, not witty. Just clumsy.

@naval We deliberately conflated the two with our kids when they were little, to encourage them to learn more. It worked well.

@CryptoAntonioni That's certainly the cause of some of it.

@JensClaessens Have you ever tried putting a whole lot of them in a world, like Bruegel?

@BronskiJoseph The heritability of neuroticism?

@staysaasy There are always some consequences you can't predict, but I doubt there has been one as unpredictable as this, unless it was something really huge like the Agricultural Revolution. But that happened slow.

So what I tell my kids about AI is to keep an eye on it. Maybe there will be an opportunity to do something amazing with it. Or maybe it will consume the field they'd been planning to enter. But never turn your back on the ocean.


It's a big mistake to define yourself in terms of your difference from someone else. You're now at their mercy. The righter they get, the wronger you have to be to remain different.

@sentientist They'd also tend to get killed in fights with one another.

Whatever your cause, if you damage art or block traffic to "draw attention" to it, you're actually hurting it, because you alienate everyone who'd been neutral up to this point.

@youness1niche I have two sons.

@brianball Lots of other people would too.

@Tyler_A_Harper @shadihamid Can fewer afford to buy a house than in the past? Unless the proportion who can afford to is lower than proportion who could in past decades, it has to be a good economy, because otherwise you're saying the economy is always bad.

@noahlt Impressive. Did you remember that phrase or did you have to look it up?

More like a colleague at this point, with a 12 yo, especially since I got some too.

@kamilkazani @migueldeicaza A prison in which families live in self-destructing cells.

Brilliantly sunny day. Pick up 12 yo at school in Defender and we go off to get ice cream and eat it standing on a grassy hillside overlooking a brilliant green valley. He'll remember this. Not this specific day, but this.

@markessien If he weren't motivated simply by money.


Post a picture of the Collison brothers from a different era. https://t.co/UYjG4uvTnN

@TuurDemeester If so then I'm apparently equally out of touch with some strikingly rapid recent evolution in English spelling and grammar.

@cremieuxrecueil Another thing you could do would be to ask these people "What research would convince you?" It would then become clear that they consider the forbidden conclusion axiomatically false. At which point you ask "Then why quibble about methodology? Why not just say so?"

@leankitjon I often do this too.

@skdh @elonmusk I like Elon. That's implicit in saying that his tweets have damaged his reputation in Britain. If I thought he was a bad guy I'd be saying instead that his tweets had shown British people his true, bad nature. But I don't think he got that...

@michelletandler You shouldn't complain. This is a valuable signal.

@ThatEricAlper I love using a Gunter rule and a pair of dividers to multiply and divide numbers by adding and subtracting their logarithms.

The more important question is whether it's possible to create a social media app where you don't have to deal with either kind of troll. I'm not sure, but my guess is yes. It's still early days. And if it is possible, that's a very exciting idea.

They're both horrible of course, but on reflection I'd say that engaging with intellectually dishonest people is worse. You have some respect for their intelligence and this causes you to waste time talking to them. Whereas with the new dumb trolls I just can't be bothered.

The old left-wing Twitter trolls used to twist what you said. The new right-wing ones don't understand what you said. So everyone who's used Twitter for sufficiently long is able to answer the question: what's worse, engaging with intellectually dishonest people or stupid ones?


@rabois Here you go: https://t.co/9MUSbYaQ3m

A startup's initial problem is usually what the product should be and how to get the first users. It may sound like those are two problems, but they're not. Ideally you solve them simultaneously, and the process of trying to get users shows you what the product should be.

@rabois Dude, haven't you been following the news? Native-born US citizens who are neither terrorists nor murderers have been sent letters telling them to leave the country immediately.

@skymayhew Depends on how much damage he did that day.

@GrdDscntN2Madnz He wasn't really even good at that.

@MollyJongFast Mostly that, but also the immigration stuff.

@ddtmatter I did see it coming.

"You were so right about Trump."

— a founder who voted for him in the last election

@panekkkk What is a "YC mentor"?

This aged unfortunately well. At the time it was about left-wing extremism. And now it sounds like I'm talking about what's happening today. That's how similar the extremists on both sides are.


You can even cheat a little. Frying onions is the high bit of the smell of dinner cooking, and that can be arranged in about one minute.

Something I told 12 yo: once you have a girlfriend or a wife living with you, they really appreciate it if they smell dinner cooking when they arrive home.

@mookimmegha @DearS_o_n One widow of a startup founder and one ex-wife.

@sricharan10g @DearS_o_n Hard to say. I think it will be mostly founders for the foreseeable future, but it's not inconceivable that most of the hedge fund guys will drop away.

@ahistoryinart We used to live near Frampton Mansell. I think this is it: https://t.co/655gepC97w

@DearS_o_n There are no athletes or artists among the very richest men, and there are a few employees. This is the breakdown:

73% startup founders
24% investors
3% early employees of startups

https://t.co/ggPKu1gN8u

@jackfarrington Strangely enough I was thinking that as I wrote it.

"Is that Colonel Sanders?"

— 12 yo on seeing a thumbnail on my desktop https://t.co/vptQkCvlWl

@vargastartup Please report the fake account to Twitter. If enough people do, they'll shut it down.

@nikitabier I seem to have succeeded; what is a Whoop wristband?


I used to find it hard to believe that journalists would fabricate quotes. That wasn't how the heroic journalists in movies behaved. But they do, regularly.

"A hundred years from now there could be some kid reading that in a comprehension in English class and thinking 'This book is so boring. I'm never going to read this.'"

— 12 yo on the book he's currently dictating

@DylanoA4 It's true that "How many of these books have you read?" is a big tell.

@kdrum Do you know why this has happened @MaxCRoser?

@Vamsi_Venkats This has not happened to me despite decades of indulging in this practice.

If you can afford it and have the space, there's nothing wrong with buying books that seem interesting but that you don't intend to read immediately. https://t.co/S3RZN4XJ6C

@heshie Depends on the startup. Something like DoorDash needs efficiency especially much. It might not be so essential in a mobile gaming startup.

@Comradealexwang If you want to learn more about Tony Xu, listen to his Social Radars episode: https://t.co/L9ZD4H3UhL

@quantian1 Actually he might well not know it.

@ifgodwillsit If this were true then you've been exploiting them too, philosopher.


@fkrstjn Yes. Some do very well. The average returns for rejected startups are of course terrible, but that's a meaningless statistic; it's an online application, so any random nut can apply, and many do.

@TimothySolinger Understanding users.

@nw3 What YC looks for in applications: https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV

@minhasv I don't think it will change this number much.

@_sickkuntJr Of course. I met a very ambitious chemical manufacturing startup this summer.

@ramiabih There has never been a limit on the number of spots. YC's policy has always been to accept every sufficiently promising startup.

YC isn't proud that it accepts such a small percentage of applications. We wish more of the applicants were good. Then YC could fund more startups, have more effect on the world, make more money, and spend less time reading applications per company accepted.

@StudioMilitary Wokeness is somewhat dangerous, but a president with a bad character is more dangerous.

@bondwithchloe @JonErlichman The founders.

@GarettJones A police visit? What did they want?


The Ronco Principle
January 2015
No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than
Ron Conway.  He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley,
half the time because he arranged it.
And yet he's a super nice guy.  In fact, nice is not the word.
Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved
badly.  It's hard even to imagine.
When I first came to Silicon Valley I thought "How lucky that someone
so powerful is so benevolent."  But gradually I realized it wasn't
luck.  It was by being benevolent that Ronco became so powerful.
All the deals he gets to invest in come to him through referrals.
Google did. Facebook did. Twitter was a referral from Evan Williams
himself.  And the reason so many people refer deals to him is that
he's proven himself to be a good guy.
Good does not mean being a pushover.  I would not want to face an
angry Ronco.  But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did
something wrong.  Ron is so old school he's Old Testament.  He will
smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it.
In almost every domain there are advantages to seeming good.  It
makes people trust you.  But actually being good is an expensive
way to seem good.  To an amoral person it might seem to be overkill.
In some fields it might be, but apparently not in the startup world.
Though plenty of investors are jerks, there is a clear trend among
them: the most successful investors are also the most upstanding.
[
1
]
It was not always this way.  I would not feel confident saying that
about investors twenty years ago.
What changed?  The startup world became more transparent and more
unpredictable.  Both make it harder to seem good without actually
being good.
It's obvious why transparency has that effect.  When an investor
maltreats a founder now, it gets out.  Maybe not all the way to the
press, but other founders hear about it, and that investor
starts to lose deals.
[
2
]
The effect of unpredictability is more subtle.  It increases the
work of being inconsistent.  If you're going to be two-faced, you
have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away
with being nasty to.  In the startup world, things change so rapidly
that you can't tell.  The random college kid you talk to today might
in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley.
If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone.
And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who
are genuinely good.
In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't seem
good without being good.
As often happens, Ron discovered how to be the investor of the
future by accident.  He didn't foresee the future of startup
investing, realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself
to behave that way. It would feel unnatural to him to behave any
other way.  He was already
living in the future
.
Fortunately that future is not limited to the startup world.  The
startup world is more transparent and unpredictable than most, but
almost everywhere the trend is in that direction.
Notes
[
1
]
I'm not saying that if you sort investors by benevolence
you've also sorted them by returns, but rather that if you do a
scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y,
you'd see a clear upward trend.
[
2
]
Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data
from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of
investor behavior.
Thanks
to Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of
this.
Japanese Translation


@edsuh The earlier you invest, the more you're investing in the founders.

@Chris_arnade Why do they turn you away?

@eshear Try to do original work.

"The first requirement of a scientist is to be curious. He must be capable of being astonished and eager to find out."

— Schrödinger

@willccbb He was a CS major at Stanford before dropping out halfway through. If that's nontechnical, the canonical startup founder at this point is nontechnical.

@Itsjoeco You should write something about how to do it. You could save a lot of people a lot of time.

@Mayanklll There are often great things happening in one field or country while bad things are happening in another field or country. The field where the bad things are happening is often politics.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

@PandeGG Being smart and being a hustler are different skills. Hustlers will hustle better if they're smart too.

@pjlbrunelle Definitely not.


@summerinthesim Bad idea. Those are already the worst. All most people can do in that few characters is call one names.

@ahistoryinart I hadn't heard of him before, but let's see if I can guess his auction prices. $35k, since these must be big, and judging from the middle name he's probably American.

@andrewtalbot Dude, there are even people calling me racist for that.

I wish Twitter had a way to send all the people calling me antisemitic for talking about Palestine to the same place as the people calling me a genocide supporter for saying that blocking traffic is a stupid tactic, so they could argue with one another instead of me.

@AnechoicMedia_ Teaching is also regulated.

@aweissman @fredwilson I think that must be it. I feel like I can't afford to ignore anything, because I have no idea what's going to work, and the worst-sounding ideas often turn out to be the best.

@aweissman @fredwilson This is really making me stop and think. It's so different from my approach, but I know Fred is smart. Maybe this is the difference between YC's stage and USV's stage of investing.

@simonw @alexhern Someone should teach him about the null hypothesis. Out of all the hundreds of thousands of words in English, there are bound to be some that ChatGPT uses disproportionately often.

@kadnan I think we were talking about WWII.

@blackoutkast I didn't just attempt to quote him (you meant quote, not cite), I did quote him. He said it.


@cwjones89 There are worse things. At least they're alive.

@cloutlessyacht Where I live it's 10:12 am.

@cremieuxrecueil Have famous people vouch for you. Or create an institute to publish the results, and make it part of the institute's brand to be so scrupulous in drawing conclusions that it's never wrong.

If you're hungry but too lazy to prepare healthy food, you'll consume junk food. If you're hungry for knowledge but too lazy to seek out the truth, you'll consume misinformation.

@cremieuxrecueil Maybe you should make it your mission to exfiltrate if not the data then at least the conclusions.

@wordgrammer It's implicit that the software is new in some way. Obviously there would be no point in shipping an inferior version of something that already existed, unless it was much cheaper.

@wordgrammer Ron Conway was a successful microcomputer era founder and he's one of the most successful AI investors. It just depends how long you keep going.

"If this gets big there's going to be some kid answering a four mark question about why that's important, and even I don't know why that's important."

— 12 yo on a passage in a story he's dictating

One of the signs of a company still run by the founder. Few hired CEOs would have the confidence to admit problems publicly like this. https://t.co/ozOQU7igz1

@nazirafzal Calling @CommunityNotes...


Five Questions about Language Design
May 2001
(These are some notes I made
for a panel discussion on programming language design
at MIT on May 10, 2001.)
1. Programming Languages Are for People.
Programming languages
are how people talk to computers.  The computer would be just as
happy speaking any language that was unambiguous.  The reason we
have high level languages is because people can't deal with
machine language.  The point of programming
languages is to prevent our poor frail human brains from being
overwhelmed by a mass of detail.
Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal
than others.  One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems
is designing bridges.  There your job is largely a matter of spanning
a given distance with the least material.  The other end of the
spectrum is designing chairs.  Chair designers have to spend their
time thinking about human butts.
Software varies in the same way. Designing algorithms for routing
data through a network is a nice, abstract problem, like designing
bridges.  Whereas designing programming languages is like designing
chairs: it's all about dealing with human weaknesses.
Most of us hate to acknowledge this.  Designing systems of great
mathematical elegance sounds a lot more appealing to most of us
than pandering to human weaknesses.  And there is a role for mathematical
elegance: some kinds of elegance make programs easier to understand.
But elegance is not an end in itself.
And when I say languages have to be designed to suit human weaknesses,
I don't mean that languages have to be designed for bad programmers.
In fact I think you ought to design for the
best programmers
, but
even the best programmers have limitations.  I don't think anyone
would like programming in a language where all the variables were
the letter x with integer subscripts.
2. Design for Yourself and Your Friends.
If you look at the history of programming languages, a lot of the best
ones were languages designed for their own authors to use, and a
lot of the worst ones were designed for other people to use.
When languages are designed for other people, it's always a specific
group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer.
So you get a language that talks down to you.  Cobol is the most
extreme case, but a lot of languages are pervaded by this spirit.
It has nothing to do with how abstract the language is.  C is pretty
low-level, but it was designed for its authors to use, and that's
why hackers like it.
The argument for designing languages for bad programmers is that
there are more bad programmers than good programmers.  That may be
so.  But those few good programmers write a disproportionately
large percentage of the software.
I'm interested in the question, how do you design a language that
the very best hackers will like?  I happen to think this is
identical to the question, how do you design a good programming
language?, but even if it isn't, it is at least an interesting
question.
3. Give the Programmer as Much Control as Possible.
Many languages
(especially the ones designed for other people) have the attitude
of a governess: they try to prevent you from
doing things that they think aren't good for you.  I like the
opposite approach: give the programmer as much
control as you can.
When I first learned Lisp, what I liked most about it was
that it considered me an equal partner.  In the other languages
I had learned up till then, there was the language and there was my
program, written in the language, and the two were very separate.
But in Lisp the functions and macros I wrote were just like those
that made up the language itself.  I could rewrite the language
if I wanted.  It had the same appeal as open-source software.
4. Aim for Brevity.
Brevity is underestimated and even scorned.
But if you look into the hearts of hackers, you'll see that they
really love it.  How many times have you heard hackers speak fondly
of how in, say, APL, they could do amazing things with just a couple
lines of code?  I think anything that really smart people really
love is worth paying attention to.
I think almost anything
you can do to make programs shorter is good.  There should be lots
of library functions; anything that can be implicit should be;
the syntax should be terse to a fault; even the names of things
should be short.
And it's not only programs that should be short.  The manual should
be thin as well.  A good part of manuals is taken up with clarifications
and reservations and warnings and special cases.  If you force
yourself to shorten the manual, in the best case you do it by fixing
the things in the language that required so much explanation.
5. Admit What Hacking Is.
A lot of people wish that hacking was
mathematics, or at least something like a natural science.  I think
hacking is more like architecture.  Architecture is
related to physics, in the sense that architects have to design
buildings that don't fall down, but the actual goal of architects
is to make great buildings, not to make discoveries about statics.
What hackers like to do is make great programs.
And I think, at least in our own minds, we have to remember that it's
an admirable thing to write great programs, even when this work
doesn't translate easily into the conventional intellectual
currency of research papers.  Intellectually, it is just as
worthwhile to design a language programmers will love as it is to design a
horrible one that embodies some idea you can publish a paper
about.
1. How to Organize Big Libraries?
Libraries are becoming an
increasingly important component of programming languages.  They're
also getting bigger, and this can be dangerous.  If it takes longer
to find the library function that will do what you want than it
would take to write it yourself, then all that code is doing nothing
but make your manual thick.  (The Symbolics manuals were a case in
point.)  So I think we will have to work on ways to organize
libraries.  The ideal would be to design them so that the programmer
could guess what library call would do the right thing.
2. Are People Really Scared of Prefix Syntax?
This is an open
problem in the sense that I have wondered about it for years and
still don't know the answer.  Prefix syntax seems perfectly natural
to me, except possibly for math.  But it could be that a lot of
Lisp's unpopularity is simply due to having an unfamiliar syntax.
Whether to do anything about it, if it is true, is another question.
3. What Do You Need for Server-Based Software?
I think a lot of the most exciting new applications that get written
in the next twenty years will be Web-based applications, meaning
programs that sit on the server and talk to you through a Web
browser.  And to write these kinds of programs we may need some
new things.
One thing we'll need is support for the new way that server-based
apps get released.  Instead of having one or two big releases a
year, like desktop software, server-based apps get released as a
series of small changes.  You may have as many as five or ten
releases a day.  And as a rule everyone will always use the latest
version.
You know how you can design programs to be debuggable?
Well, server-based software likewise has to be designed to be
changeable.  You have to be able to change it easily, or at least
to know what is a small change and what is a momentous one.
Another thing that might turn out to be useful for server based
software, surprisingly, is continuations.  In Web-based software
you can use something like continuation-passing style to get the
effect of
subroutines
in the inherently
stateless world of a Web
session.  Maybe it would be worthwhile having actual continuations,
if it was not too expensive.
4. What New Abstractions Are Left to Discover?
I'm not sure how
reasonable a hope this is, but one thing I would really love to
do, personally, is discover a new abstraction-- something that would
make as much of a difference as having first class functions or
recursion or even keyword parameters.  This may be an impossible
dream.  These things don't get discovered that often.  But I am always
looking.
1. You Can Use Whatever Language You Want.
Writing application
programs used to mean writing desktop software.  And in desktop
software there is a big bias toward writing the application in the
same language as the operating system.  And so ten years ago,
writing software pretty much meant writing software in C.
Eventually a tradition evolved:
application programs must not be written in unusual languages.
And this tradition had so long to develop that nontechnical people
like managers and venture capitalists also learned it.
Server-based software blows away this whole model.  With server-based
software you can use any language you want.  Almost nobody understands
this yet (especially not managers and venture capitalists).
A few hackers understand it, and that's why we even hear
about new, indy languages like Perl and Python.  We're not hearing
about Perl and Python because people are using them to write Windows
apps.
What this means for us, as people interested in designing programming
languages, is that there is now potentially an actual audience for
our work.
2. Speed Comes from Profilers.
Language designers, or at least
language implementors, like to write compilers that generate fast
code.  But I don't think this is what makes languages fast for users.
Knuth pointed out long ago that speed only matters in a few critical
bottlenecks.  And anyone who's tried it knows that you can't guess
where these bottlenecks are.  Profilers are the answer.
Language designers are solving the wrong problem.  Users don't need
benchmarks to run fast.  What they need is a language that can show
them what parts of their own programs need to be rewritten.  That's
where speed comes from in practice.  So maybe it would be a net
win if language implementors took half the time they would
have spent doing compiler optimizations and spent it writing a
good profiler instead.
3. You Need an Application to Drive the Design of a Language.
This may not be an absolute rule, but it seems like the best languages
all evolved together with some application they were being used to
write.  C was written by people who needed it for systems programming.
Lisp was developed partly to do symbolic differentiation, and
McCarthy was so eager to get started that he was writing differentiation
programs even in the first paper on Lisp, in 1960.
It's especially good if your application solves some new problem.
That will tend to drive your language to have new features that
programmers need.  I personally am interested in writing
a language that will be good for writing server-based applications.
[During the panel, Guy Steele also made this point, with the
additional suggestion that the application should not consist of
writing the compiler for your language, unless your language
happens to be intended for writing compilers.]
4. A Language Has to Be Good for Writing Throwaway Programs.
You know what a throwaway program is: something you write quickly for
some limited task.  I think if you looked around you'd find that
a lot of big, serious programs started as throwaway programs.  I
would not be surprised if
most
programs started as throwaway
programs.  And so if you want to make a language that's good for
writing software in general, it has to be good for writing throwaway
programs, because that is the larval stage of most software.
5. Syntax Is Connected to Semantics.
It's traditional to think of
syntax and semantics as being completely separate.  This will
sound shocking, but it may be that they aren't.
I think that what you want in your language may be related
to how you express it.
I was talking recently to Robert Morris, and he pointed out that
operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix
syntax.  In a language with prefix syntax, any function you define
is effectively an operator.  If you want to define a plus for a
new type of number you've made up, you can just define a new function
to add them.  If you do that in a language with infix syntax,
there's a big difference in appearance between the use of an
overloaded operator and a function call.
1. New Programming Languages.
Back in the 1970s
it was fashionable to design new programming languages.  Recently
it hasn't been.  But I think server-based software will make new
languages fashionable again.  With server-based software, you can
use any language you want, so if someone does design a language that
actually seems better than others that are available, there will be
people who take a risk and use it.
2. Time-Sharing.
Richard Kelsey gave this as an idea whose time
has come again in the last panel, and I completely agree with him.
My guess (and Microsoft's guess, it seems) is that much computing
will move from the desktop onto remote servers.  In other words,
time-sharing is back.  And I think there will need to be support
for it at the language level.  For example, I know that Richard
and Jonathan Rees have done a lot of work implementing process
scheduling within Scheme 48.
3. Efficiency.
Recently it was starting to seem that computers
were finally fast enough.  More and more we were starting to hear
about byte code, which implies to me at least that we feel we have
cycles to spare.  But I don't think we will, with server-based
software.   Someone is going to have to pay for the servers that
the software runs on, and the number of users they can support per
machine will be the divisor of their capital cost.
So I think efficiency will matter, at least in computational
bottlenecks.  It will be especially important to do i/o fast,
because server-based applications do a lot of i/o.
It may turn out that byte code is not a win, in the end.  Sun and
Microsoft seem to be facing off in a kind of a battle of the byte
codes at the moment.  But they're doing it because byte code is a
convenient place to insert themselves into the process, not because
byte code is in itself a good idea.  It may turn out that this
whole battleground gets bypassed.  That would be kind of amusing.
1. Clients.
This is just a guess, but my guess is that
the winning model for most applications will be purely server-based.
Designing software that works on the assumption that everyone will
have your client is like designing a society on the assumption that
everyone will just be honest.  It would certainly be convenient, but
you have to assume it will never happen.
I think there will be a proliferation of devices that have some
kind of Web access, and all you'll be able to assume about them is
that they can support simple html and forms.  Will you have a
browser on your cell phone?  Will there be a phone in your palm
pilot?  Will your blackberry get a bigger screen? Will you be able
to browse the Web on your gameboy?  Your watch?  I don't know.
And I don't have to know if I bet on
everything just being on the server.  It's
just so much more robust to have all the
brains on the server
.
2. Object-Oriented Programming.
I realize this is a
controversial one, but I don't think object-oriented programming
is such a big deal.  I think it is a fine model for certain kinds
of applications that need that specific kind of data structure,
like window systems, simulations, and cad programs.  But I don't
see why it ought to be the model for all programming.
I think part of the reason people in big companies like object-oriented
programming is because it yields a lot of what looks like work.
Something that might naturally be represented as, say, a list of
integers, can now be represented as a class with all kinds of
scaffolding and hustle and bustle.
Another attraction of
object-oriented programming is that methods give you some of the
effect of first class functions.  But this is old news to Lisp
programmers.  When you have actual first class functions, you can
just use them in whatever way is appropriate to the task at hand,
instead of forcing everything into a mold of classes and methods.
What this means for language design, I think, is that you shouldn't
build object-oriented programming in too deeply.  Maybe the
answer is to offer more general, underlying stuff, and let people design
whatever object systems they want as libraries.
3. Design by Committee.
Having your language designed by a committee is a big pitfall,
and not just for the reasons everyone knows about.  Everyone
knows that committees tend to yield lumpy, inconsistent designs.
But I think a greater danger is that they won't take risks.
When one person is in charge he can take risks
that a committee would never agree on.
Is it necessary to take risks to design a good language though?
Many people might suspect
that language design is something where you should stick fairly
close to the conventional wisdom.  I bet this isn't true.
In everything else people do, reward is proportionate to risk.
Why should language design be any different?
Japanese Translation