For more details, read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution.
Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
31–40 of 125 posts
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 skil…
"Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?" Maybe there isn't a final, perfect Lisp. Maybe there are lots of individual Lisps that are each perfect for some class of problems. That's one of the great strengths of Lisp: if an existing implementation is almost-but-not-quite what you need, you can throw a few macros on it and adapt it into a new language that is what you need. It's one…
What you're doing is arguing semantics. Whoever feels like replying to a reply of a reply long enough that all meaning has been lost and the other person stops posting, is the "winner." Whover is smarter and can come up with great examples can easily make another person defensive and tired of arguing. This person can then "win" arguments simply because the person who just wrote about actually developing something is busy developing.
This is actually what causes that disparity between what people think of new technology when it first comes out and two years later, as long as it still exists: one party was busy developing, the other party was busy coming up with reasons it can't be done, getting pats on the back for being so smart, then riding that dopamine rush to nowhere fast for two years until they meet the product again and just say "oh, I was wrong." Then this cycle continues. That's what PG's essay is about.
But being unable or unwilling to argue semantics does not make the original poster's ideas wrong. The only way to prove a determined person wrong is to engage in direct competition, and from the rear, of course, as the other party is already ahead of you. For obvious reasons, it's easier and "smarter" to come up with "logical" reasons than to "do the full experiment" to show it's wrong. We're not talking about math equations here, so a productive person's potential is more than his writing but also his skills, experience, credibility, and dedication, which can't all be ignored.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#33I like a lot of what this essay says, but I still don't think it applies to Arc. Because the criticisms of Arc would have happened no matter what the design had been.
For the most part, Lisp people will never like any modification to the language that changes their pure abstract computation engine into something that more people would want to use.
Behold, a Usenet post from 2000 on the notion of a "lispscript" that could compete with perl or awk:
http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-wi...
That said, I personally have no idea if Arc is all that good or not. I get it, but it doesn't inspire me the way Haskell or Erlang do right now. But Arc seems to be successful by the designer's own standards.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#34I like a lot of what this essay says, but I still don't think it applies to Arc. Because the criticisms of Arc would have happened no matter what the design had been. For the most part, Lisp people will never like any modification to the language that changes their pure abstract computation engine into something that more people would want to use. Behold, a Usenet post from 2000 on the notion of a "lispscript" that c…
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Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#35There'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…
(g) Profit!
Hence the gnomes' predicament is solved.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#36I 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…
"Right now" doesn't and will never matter. "Right now" is incompetence, lazyness, lack of awareness, comfort, and politics all rolled into one. That's the definition of "right now." It is a horrible, horrible measure of what can or should be achieved. I don't think Paul intended this to be a ground-breaking article. I doubht he's saying that those specific examples lead him to a certain process with a certain guarant…
"Right now" is incompetence, lazyness, lack of awareness, comfort, and politics all rolled into one.
And yet that's what the market generally pays for.
Your list reminds me of Levchin's advice from http://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-entrep...
As a final word of product development advice, Levchin encouraged founders to think about the Bible’s seven deadly sins - especially greed, sloth, envy, pride and gluttony. These characteristics, he said, describe many of the primal motivations for users.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?" Maybe there isn't a final, perfect Lisp. Maybe there are lots of individual Lisps that are each perfect for some class of problems. That's one of the great strengths of Lisp: if an existing implementation is almost-but-not-quite what you need, you can throw a few macros on it and adapt it into a new language that is what you need. It's one…
What you're doing is arguing semantics. Whoever feels like replying to a reply of a reply long enough that all meaning has been lost and the other person stops posting, is the "winner." Whover is smarter and can come up with great examples can easily make another person defensive and tired of arguing. This person can then "win" arguments simply because the person who just wrote about actually developing something is…
;) I think you won.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#38I 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…
I think there's very interesting thing happening around Arc. It appears that people there are less afraid of making mistakes or repeating past attempts. Maybe because pg broke some Lisp traditions so that others feel more free to step out of them as well. Maybe because people with other language background are gathering so there are more divergence of minds.
I have my own Scheme implementation (Gauche) and I live on writing software in it, and I keep trying new ideas with it. For that regards, I don't need Arc. But that kind of atmosphere at arclanguage.org, that's not something I can get without Arc.
Maybe most of the ideas tried there will turn out not to work, but new ideas need a place like there to come out. In a sense, Arc isn't a new programming language, but a medium that sheds a new light to the language design process.
And I'm watching it closely to steal whatever good ideas that come out :-)
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#39I 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.
I'm still trying to get a handle on which of these apply to Arc. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, but Arc feels a little light in areas (a-c).
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#40It's a succinct summary of a method for developing new ideas/products. The closest I have seen for brevity is Bob Bemer (the inventor of ASCII) with
"Do Something Small But Useful Now"
which he also wrote as ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)
so that it became this sequence:
Do Something
Do Something Small
Do Something Small But Useful
Do Something Small But Useful Now
see http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ for more info