2020-02-21 10:38:34 +01:00
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# I'd like to read all of Paul Graham's essays. I cannot rely on my web browser
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# to tell me which I've already read, so I'm resorting to an org file.
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* TODO How to Write Usefully
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* DONE Being a Noob
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* TODO Haters
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* TODO The Two Kinds of Moderate
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* TODO Fashionable Problems
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* TODO Having Kids
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* DONE The Lesson to Unlearn
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* TODO Novelty and Heresy
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* TODO The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
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* TODO General and Surprising
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* DONE Charisma / Power
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* TODO The Risk of Discovery
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* TODO How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
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* TODO Life is Short
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* TODO Economic Inequality
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* TODO The Refragmentation
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* TODO Jessica Livingston
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* TODO A Way to Detect Bias
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* TODO Write Like You Talk
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* TODO Default Alive or Default Dead?
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* TODO Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
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* TODO Change Your Name
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* TODO What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
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* TODO The Ronco Principle
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* TODO What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
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* TODO Don't Talk to Corp Dev
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* TODO Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
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* TODO How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
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* TODO How You Know
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* TODO The Fatal Pinch
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* DONE Mean People Fail
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* TODO Before the Startup
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* TODO How to Raise Money
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* TODO Investor Herd Dynamics
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* TODO How to Convince Investors
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* TODO Do Things that Don't Scale
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* TODO Startup Investing Trends
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* TODO How to Get Startup Ideas
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* TODO The Hardware Renaissance
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* TODO Startup = Growth
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* TODO Black Swan Farming
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* TODO The Top of My Todo List
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* TODO Writing and Speaking
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* TODO How Y Combinator Started
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* TODO Defining Property
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* TODO Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
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* TODO A Word to the Resourceful
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* TODO Schlep Blindness
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* TODO Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
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* TODO Why Startup Hubs Work
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* TODO The Patent Pledge
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* TODO Subject: Airbnb
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* TODO Founder Control
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* TODO Tablets
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* TODO What We Look for in Founders
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* TODO The New Funding Landscape
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* TODO Where to See Silicon Valley
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* TODO High Resolution Fundraising
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* TODO What Happened to Yahoo
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* TODO The Future of Startup Funding
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* TODO The Acceleration of Addictiveness
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* TODO The Top Idea in Your Mind
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* TODO How to Lose Time and Money
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* TODO Organic Startup Ideas
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* TODO Apple's Mistake
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* TODO What Startups Are Really Like
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* TODO Persuade xor Discover
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* TODO Post-Medium Publishing
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* TODO The List of N Things
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* TODO The Anatomy of Determination
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* TODO What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
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* TODO The Trouble with the Segway
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* TODO Ramen Profitable
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* DONE Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
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* TODO A Local Revolution?
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* TODO Why Twitter is a Big Deal
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* TODO The Founder Visa
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* TODO Five Founders
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* TODO Relentlessly Resourceful
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* TODO How to Be an Angel Investor
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* TODO Why TV Lost
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* TODO Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
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* TODO What I've Learned from Hacker News
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* TODO Startups in 13 Sentences
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* TODO Keep Your Identity Small
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* TODO After Credentials
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* TODO Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
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* TODO The High-Res Society
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* TODO The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
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* TODO Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
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* TODO A Fundraising Survival Guide
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* TODO The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
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* TODO Cities and Ambition
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* TODO Disconnecting Distraction
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* TODO Lies We Tell Kids
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* TODO Be Good
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* TODO Why There Aren't More Googles
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* TODO Some Heroes
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* TODO How to Disagree
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* TODO You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
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* TODO A New Venture Animal
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* TODO Trolls
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* TODO Six Principles for Making New Things
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* TODO Why to Move to a Startup Hub
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* TODO The Future of Web Startups
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* TODO How to Do Philosophy
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* TODO News from the Front
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* TODO How Not to Die
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* TODO Holding a Program in One's Head
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* TODO Stuff
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* TODO The Equity Equation
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* TODO An Alternative Theory of Unions
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* TODO The Hacker's Guide to Investors
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* TODO Two Kinds of Judgement
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* TODO Microsoft is Dead
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* TODO Why to Not Not Start a Startup
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* TODO Is It Worth Being Wise?
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* TODO Learning from Founders
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* TODO How Art Can Be Good
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* TODO The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
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* TODO A Student's Guide to Startups
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* TODO How to Present to Investors
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* TODO Copy What You Like
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* TODO The Island Test
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* TODO The Power of the Marginal
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* TODO Why Startups Condense in America
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* TODO How to Be Silicon Valley
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* TODO The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
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* TODO See Randomness
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* TODO Are Software Patents Evil?
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* TODO 6,631,372
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* TODO Why YC
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* TODO How to Do What You Love
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* TODO Good and Bad Procrastination
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* TODO Web 2.0
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* TODO How to Fund a Startup
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* TODO The Venture Capital Squeeze
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* TODO Ideas for Startups
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* TODO What I Did this Summer
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* TODO Inequality and Risk
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* TODO After the Ladder
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* TODO What Business Can Learn from Open Source
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* TODO Hiring is Obsolete
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* TODO The Submarine
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* TODO Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
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* TODO Return of the Mac
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* DONE Writing, Briefly
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* TODO Undergraduation
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* TODO A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
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* TODO How to Start a Startup
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* TODO What You'll Wish You'd Known
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* TODO Made in USA
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* TODO It's Charisma, Stupid
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* TODO Bradley's Ghost
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* TODO A Version 1.0
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* TODO What the Bubble Got Right
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* TODO The Age of the Essay
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* TODO The Python Paradox
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* TODO Great Hackers
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* TODO Mind the Gap
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* TODO How to Make Wealth
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* TODO The Word "Hacker"
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* TODO What You Can't Say
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* TODO Filters that Fight Back
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* TODO Hackers and Painters
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* TODO If Lisp is So Great
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* TODO The Hundred-Year Language
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* TODO Why Nerds are Unpopular
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* TODO Better Bayesian Filtering
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* TODO Design and Research
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* TODO A Plan for Spam
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* TODO Revenge of the Nerds
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* TODO Succinctness is Power
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* TODO What Languages Fix
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Read Paul Graham article "Taste for Makers"
I'm considering this essay one of my favorites from Paul Graham. The essay
argues that good taste and bad taste exist. Graham argues against relativism in
design and cites a variety of examples of architecture, typography, writing,
sketching, painting, aircraft design, and others that bolster his opinion.
TL;DR - Design should strive to be:
- Simple: Prefer simplicity to complexity when possible.
- Timeless: Design today for tomorrow by pleasing yesterday.
- Pointed: Focus always on the problem; don't work for work's sake.
- Suggestive: Constrain usage without suffocating the user.
- Humorous: Prefer light-heartedness to sobriety.
- Difficult: "Good design" is takes time, effort, and tremendous skill.
- Ostensibly effortless: Solutions should look obviously correct.
- Symmetric Appreciate symmetry.
- Natural: In nature, form ever follows function.
- Iterative: Write; rewrite; rewrite; rewrite; throw away; write; publish.
- Imitative: Be confident enough to copy others' existing, beautiful ideas.
- Communal: Pay attention to "Schelling points" and join the party. Don't be the
Milanese Da Vinci.
- Fearless: Question the status quo; expect others to challenge your solution.
2020-03-02 14:09:07 +01:00
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* DONE Taste for Makers
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2020-02-21 10:38:34 +01:00
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* TODO Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
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* TODO What Made Lisp Different
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* TODO The Other Road Ahead
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* TODO The Roots of Lisp
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2020-02-26 21:11:39 +01:00
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* DONE Five Questions about Language Design
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Read Paul Graham's "Being Popular" essay
Maybe this is my recency bias writing, but "Being Popular" may be one of my
favorite Paul Graham essays that I've read.
"Being Popular" outlines Paul Graham's ideas about what an ideal programming
language would look like. This essay took me 1-2 hours to read, but it was worth
the time.
Here are some quotes that I enjoyed (not sorted in any meaningful order):
"A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. He knows
that people sometimes ask for things that they turn out not to want. To avoid
wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do
something; by then, whoever's asking him may be fairly annoyed, but at least
they probably really do want whatever they're asking for."
"In this particular case there is a way to finesse our way out of the
problem. If we treat data structures as if they were functions on indexes, we
could write (a x y) instead, which is even shorter than the Perl form. Similar
tricks may shorten other types of expressions."
"The latest hot language, Python, is a watered-down Lisp with infix syntax and
no macros."
"Hackers would think a lot more highly of Lisp if Common Lisp had powerful
string libraries and good OS support."
"I think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be
a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a
bumbler who needs to be protected from himself."
Some take-aways:
- Let's refer to Python as "Diet Lisp" from now until the end of time.
- Fight to keep your user-base small for as long as you can. Only fools want
large user bases.
- Rich Hickey definitely read this article; he took some ideas with him; he left
some ideas behind.
- Focus language design efforts around defining rich standard libraries,
especially for string manipulation.
- Worry little about supporting backwards compatibility; design a language that
can and is often rewritten.
- Shift the burden of optimizing code performance to the user by designing a
powerful runtime profiler that is tightly integrated into the language
runtime.
- Minimize the costs users face when experimenting: ensure that your language is
interactive; ensure users can create REPLs quickly.
- Support OS-level libraries (think about Go).
- Maximize introspection and hackability.
What a useful read!
2020-02-25 11:42:37 +01:00
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* DONE Being Popular
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2020-02-21 10:38:34 +01:00
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* DONE Java's Cover
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* DONE Beating the Averages
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2020-02-21 20:47:54 +01:00
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* DONE Lisp for Web-Based Applications
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2020-02-21 10:38:34 +01:00
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* TODO Chapter 1 of Ansi Common Lisp
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* TODO Chapter 2 of Ansi Common Lisp
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2020-02-21 13:29:28 +01:00
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* DONE Programming Bottom-Up
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* DONE This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
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