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 … - Paul Graham

Sometimes people who discover a new kind of work know that they have. Other times they just do something so well that imitating them becomes a genre.

I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

I’ve programmed in all kinds of languages, said the tough old hacker as he eased up to the bar, and it don’t matter which you use... This is nonsense, of course. There is a world of difference between, say, Fortran I and the latest version of Perl or for that matter between early versions of Perl and the latest version of Perl. But the tough old hacker may himself believe what he’s saying. It’s possible to write the same primitive Pascal-like programs in almost every language. If you only ever eat at McDonald’s, it will seem that food is much the same in every country.