Paul Graham

I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end — a Neanderthal language. I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, “How can you say that Java won’t turn out to be a successful language? It’s already a successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it, or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won’t turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.

It’s hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

Someone asked how to expand startups' ideas. The best way is to shrink the idea down to its essence, then ask how broadly that essential idea could be expanded. You have to shrink it first, though, or there will be random stuff left in it that impedes its expansion.

In many domains it's an advantage to have a culture of doing things fast and cheaply. But organizations never shift toward this as they age; if they shift, it's always in the other direction. So the only way to have this culture is to start with it and not lose it.

I used to think <person> was smart. Then I discovered that he disagrees with me about <political issue>, and I realized he couldn't be, because no one who disagrees with me about <political issue> could be smart.

Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.

Prestige is an ok motivator, but curiosity is a better one. Curiosity never lies.

How can you see the wave, when you’re the water?

Once you’re allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it.

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.

There are two ways to be stupid: plain lack of brainpower, and ideology. The two are far from mutually exclusive though. If you're not intelligent enough, you're more likely to allow in an ideology that drags you even further down.

If the objection being made to a piece of general advice is that it's not for everyone, then it's probably pretty good. No advice is for everyone, so that's just the background radiation of objections.

Since ideologues get their opinions in bulk, they assume everyone else does too, and thus that anyone who disagrees with one of their opinions must disagree with all of them.

One difficulty when trying to ban ideas on social networks is that it's the edge cases that matter most, but bans are enforced by low-level employees who don't understand them.