Paul Graham Quotes

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

The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.

When I was a kid I was constantly being told to look at things from someone else’s point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it. Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success. Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn’t imply that you’ll act in his interest; in some situations — in war, for example — you want to do exactly the opposite.

A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase “software engineering” shake their heads disapprovingly.

"If you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a "tame animal" who thinks that he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write."

A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker’s naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran’s skepticism. You have to be able to think how hard can it be? with one half of your brain while thinking it will never work with the other.

Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

the way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it. This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.

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.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means.

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn’t, that probably doesn’t make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn’t, that’s not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.