Reading 05: Power Tools and Rabbit Holes

  I really enjoyed the core messages of the essays for Writing 05. While I still get the sense that Paul Graham has a chip on his shoulder, at least in these essays he did make sweeping statements attacking the pillars of American society. Instead, he picked a topic he has a lot of experience in, and gave his personal opinion on it (which ironically, is the message he is trying to convey). 

I do not know if I am qualified to truly judge most of the content from this week’s reading, considering:


  1. I have only really coded in mainstream languages (Python, Java, C#, C)

  2. Have little experience working in a start-up environment


So take whatever I say with a grain of salt. 


I’ll start by saying I really appreciated the message of “Beating the Averages.” A lot of what he said was common sense, but it needed to be said. The message of it “being a mistake to program in anything but the most powerful language” is inherently true, but I think a lot of people look past it. If you want to be a disruptor, you would be disadvantaging yourself not to take full advantage of the tools and resources available. Obviously there are other uses of less-powerful languages: learning, practice, etc. But if you’re in the start-up world and trying to truly disrupt the norm, why would you hinder your company by not taking full advantage of the resources available? I actually think this could be a really interesting dialogue considering the explosion of AI tools which aid development, but I won’t get into that here. 

I also think this message of “using the most powerful tools” can be applied beyond the software development industry. If you ever have a goal in life, take full advantage of the most powerful, cutting edge, and proven tools to succeed. Not doing so would be making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself (unless that’s your goal).


Shifting gears towards “The Hundred-Year Language,” I appreciated when Graham said “wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time.” Over the summer I recall a conversation with my boss about a program he wrote for a client, where he was trying to bum a process down to run in under 5 seconds. He went down a massive rabbit hole trying to beat this threshold, but when he met with the client again, they said “we’d be super happy if this can run in under an hour.” Here my boss was, ultra-fixated on this self-set threshold of 5 seconds, when the hope was just to break 3600 seconds. In doing so, he focused a ton of energy in a place that didn’t need it. And also as I mentioned before, I think AI is a really interesting conversation to have in relation to this quote. Does the programmer of the future need to know the nitty-gritty syntax anymore? Or can he/she skate by knowing the “big idea” and letting GPT or Copilot churn out lines for them? 



And lastly, I thought “Revenge of the Nerds” would be a cool story about hackers vs non-hackers, but it seemed like an advertisement for Lisp. I don’t have much else to say about it.

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