Holding a Program in One's Head (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)

paulgraham.com

55 pointsColinWright5 comments

Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Arguably a market is such a form of organization, though it may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible.

It's interesting to read this as I'm reading Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid, a tactical history of soccer. One of the great divides is between teams that adapt their players to a tactical system and teams that adapt their tactical system to the strengths of their players. One of the interesting paradoxes is that the Dutch tactic of "Total Football" relied upon the players on the field literally interchanging positions from front to back, and yet it was designed in order to suit the mentality and talents of Johan Cruijff.

Might as well mention an earlier paulgraham.com: http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html ("Great Hackers") - here's a tiny summary that misses a lot:

  - Some programmers (using paulgraham's term) are orders of magnitude more
    productive
  - They're often motivated by the tools they get to use
  - They're also motivated by interesting ideas/challenges

> It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points by accident.

The paragraph following sounds plausible, but I've never heard of this resulting in a successful product for a company. The closest I can think of is gmail - but that was in google's officially sanctioned 20% time. Examples anyone?

I hit most of the 8 points when I wrote a mobile app in my free time as an intern. It provides remote monitoring of our hybrid battery lab (we staff one shift, test 24/7). It's not a product, per say, but our lead test engineers use it daily. :)

Just FYI, it's "per se", not "per say" : latin for "by itself".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com