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Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

paulgraham.com

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Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#11

Post by BrandonM »

aswanson wrote: post #5

I remember reading Paul's essays, pre YC. When he wrote the essay announcing it, I remember thinking, "This guy is crazy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of school projects." Sure enough, he did, and wrote about it. I felt vindicated by that, saying to myself, "I knew THAT was going nowhere." People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. After reddit, loopt, zenter, anywhere.fm, etc.,…

People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason.

I know there are a lot of people like this, but there is also a perhaps equally-large number of people who feel the opposite way. Personally, I love to be proven wrong when I predict failure, unless I have some other reason for wanting someone to fail (they use unethical practices, they're my direct competition, etc.).

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#14

Post by aswanson »

BrandonM wrote: post #11
aswanson wrote: post #5

I remember reading Paul's essays, pre YC. When he wrote the essay announcing it, I remember thinking, "This guy is crazy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of school projects." Sure enough, he did, and wrote about it. I felt vindicated by that, saying to myself, "I knew THAT was going nowhere." People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. After reddit, loopt, zenter, anywhere.fm, etc.,…

People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. I know there are a lot of people like this, but there is also a perhaps equally-large number of people who feel the opposite way. Personally, I love to be proven wrong when I predict failure, unless I have some other reason for wanting someone to fail (they use unethical practices, they're my direct competition, etc.).

I know what you mean, and I was happy to be wrong in this case.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#15

Post by aston »

nostrademons wrote: post #10

I agree on general principle, but there's a big difference between Viaweb & YCombinator vs. Arc: Market. Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usua…

Upmodded for your first half. But Arc is definitely not drop in replacement for PHP. And you can use PHP 5 in basically the same ways you could use PHP 3.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#16

Post by dkokelley »

skenney26 wrote: post #7

If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.

I don't think anyone was really processing credit cards through the web at that point, at least not unless you paid out the nose for a custom system. "Sales" could still be made over the web, you just couldn't receive payment for them - like an online catalog really.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#17

Post by pg »

nostrademons wrote: post #10

I agree on general principle, but there's a big difference between Viaweb & YCombinator vs. Arc: Market. Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usua…

They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves.

Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?

What you seem to be saying is that being smart automatically makes people good at language design. And you are just dead wrong. Being smart may make you a good language implementor, but there's little correlation between that and the kind of skills you need to be a good language designer. Some of the worst languages in the world were designed by smart people.

It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.

The Arc users on arclanguage.org don't seem that contemptuous.

So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language.

That seems a good sign to me. Munging the language is what you do with Lisp, like numerical calculations are what you do with Fortran. So what this means to me is that the users are real Lisp hackers, using the language as Lisp is meant to be used.

Plus I explicitly said that at this stage I'm mostly interested in the core language, and that I want to hear new ideas in that department.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#18

Post by pg »

skenney26 wrote: post #7

If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.

They wanted to be able to generate a good-looking site with large numbers of products and a way for people to order them. Till about 1997 online order volumes were so small that it was no problem for merchants to manually punch in credit card nos on their POS terminal.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#19

Post by Alex3917 »

"When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction."

Jeffrey Rosen has some good stuff to say about this in his book The Unwanted Gaze. One of his defenses of the right to privacy is that new ideas often seem wrong at first, especially when they're still only half baked. And because of this, progress is seriously impeded when the government has the ability to go through our journals and sketchbooks at any time. This is especially true in our made-for-TV society where most people won't put more than thirty seconds into trying to understand something, esp. considering the factors PG mentions. He suggests that for these reasons innovation may not be possible in a fully transparent society.

Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

#20

Post by ratsbane »

pius wrote: post #3
dkokelley wrote: post #2

There's one paragraph in there that I think sums the entire essay. When I read it I was so stuck by it that I put that paragraph on my desktop image ( http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg ). Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rap…

I'd add the closing paragraph to this as well: So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.

Reading PG's essays makes me very happy. Quoting again:

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Perfect.

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