Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
paulgraham.com
Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
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Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#2There'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 rapidly.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#3There'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.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#4There'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.
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Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#5I 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., however, I don't think I was completely accurate in my prediction....
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#6"... your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own."
Which Feynman quotation is this referring to?
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#7If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#8"... your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own." Which Feynman quotation is this referring to?
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#9If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.
Maybe the ability to reach customers around the world much cheaper than any other way? Remember that the first (and most of the) customers were already-existing businesses, hence they presumably already had a method for processing transactions.
At least, that's my guess.
Re: Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
#10I 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 (usually) can't fund it themselves.
Arc, however, is explicitly aimed at the high end. It's meant to be a "LFSP". And smart people can write Arc themselves (and have ;-)). They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves.
Hence the contemptuous reaction, and why I think Arc is in more trouble than either Viaweb or YC. It's not really a problem when your peers are contemptuous, because that just means they're less likely to compete with you. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.
If I were in charge of Arc marketing, I'd position it as the "PHP for the ones that PHP forgot". PHP initially got its start as a way to throw a quick & dirty webapp prototype up on the web, and then incrementally refine it. But around version 5, it started getting complex and adding all these features from Java. That's left a vacuum at the bottom of the web language market. Rails and Django tried to fill it, but the average Django user is quite a bit more sophisticated than the average PHP user circa 1999. And Arc's design is already pretty well-suited to throwing a design up on the screen quickly.
Right now, the majority of Arc users seem to be disenchanted Lispers. Disenchanted Lispers tend to be smart people, and they also tend to be interested in language design. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. On arclanguage.com, I've seen one person write an app with the language, and several dozen people write enhancements of the language itself, either in the form of macros or as hacks to the interpreter itself.