Hackers and Painters

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

One day while I was sitting in my graduate level Operating System class, bored out of my mind, the professor went on a tangent and started talking about coding styles. He mentioned a man by the name of Paul Graham and how Paul thought coding / hacking was similar to painting. This immediately caught my ear and I made note of a famous essay, entitled “Hackers and Painters”, that Paul had apparently written.

Reading Graham’s essay was like a shot in the arm. It reminded me why I was a programmer and why I went to school as a computer scientist. So many people go into computer science for the money, and so many of the people who teach it are “researchers” or theorists, I think it makes someone like me forget why they liked it in the first place. I related to that essay very well, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs as a hobby.