Paul Graham On Two Kinds of Programmers and Painters
cycle-gap.blogspot.com
cycle-gap.blogspot.com
No it's not. This is wrong for the same reason that idlewords is wrong when he says that the thesis of H&P is:
"Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
This isn't a thesis that pg is trying to prove. Rather, it's a source of ideas. That is,
"Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?"
The essay doesn't even identify what those ideas are, let alone try to disprove them. All he's attacking is the source of the ideas. That's like saying Newton's theory of gravity is wrong because sitting under apple trees is gay.
Yes it is. Because that's what it says, as opposed to what you'd like to believe it said. In fact you quoted its fundamental point right there -
"Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
How is this not equating hackers and painters? How is the rest of the verbiage not 'a thesis he is trying to prove' but rather 'a source of ideas'. The writing directly contradicts what you are saying.
This pattern is basically repeated in every single paragraph, e.g.
* The reputations of hackers probably have a large random component introduced by fashion, as happens with artists.
* In hacking as with painting, it’s best to start by sketching
* Both software and paintings are intended for a human audience, so both hackers must have empathy to do good work.
The essay was written for the benefit of hackers, so if you want to attack the ideas in the essay, a 'good' argument might be that hacking does not require empathy. As opposed to saying that the idea that the best paintings were done between 1430 and 1500 is just some guy's opinion, which adds nothing.
Now if you wanted to challenge the ideas about art as a way of challenging the ideas about hacking then that would at least be interesting, but just nitpicking about art history is lame.
It's a strange situation. If someone writes an essay attacking you, you either have to respond, in which case you're letting someone else pick your topics, or you have to ignore it, in which case people who don't know any better may be convinced by it.
Though I'm not willing to use up an essay to refute someone, I will in a comment thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984217
One thing I still wonder about is whether this guy actually believes what's he's saying, or whether he's deliberately trolling. He seems reasonably smart. How could he not have heard of Franz Hals? On the other hand, who would try to keep a troll going for 4 years?
The exact quote I was responding to in my essay:
"When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted."
In support of which you now cite... Frans Hals, a sui generis painter who worked two hundred years later. I'm surprised you chose him over El Greco, who at least is within two centuries of the time period under discussion.
It's been entertaining watching you try to walk your various misstatements about art history back in this thread, but I am somewhat surprised by this habit of calling people who poke holes in your writing "trolls", given that you are the author of a celebrated taxonomy of online argument that places name-callers among the lowest of the low.
Weenis.
My support for the statement that oil paint allowed painters to blend and overpaint is the example I gave earlier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...
Van Eyck, who was such an early user of oil paint that for much of history he was considered the inventor of oil painting, is also one of the standard examples of overpainting to correct mistakes. How much more conclusive evidence could one want?
You can link every Dutch master you want without making your argument any less bogus.
Here's what I actually wrote:
"The allusion a sketchy, iterative style of painting that used to be called "alla prima", where you block shapes in in oil paint and then swoosh them around the composition as the painting progresses, perhaps repainting entire sections of the picture. This is the way Graham and I were taught to paint, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with painting in the fifteenth century."
If you want to refute me, show me the Renaissance master who painted directly onto a blank canvas, starting with a "blurry sketch" and iteratively refining it into a finished work, like Hals, or Manet, or Rubens, or Bob Ross, rather than working with underdrawings and thin glazes of color.
You can't, because no one painted like that then. But talking about painstaking preliminary design and a sequential, pretty rigid method would have been inconvenient for the purposes of your essay.
Let's check. These two paragraphs are everything I've written about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century:
It helps to have a medium that makes change easy.
When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth
century, it helped painters to deal with difficult
subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera,
oil can be blended and overpainted. (Taste for Makers)
What made oil paint so exciting, when it first
became popular in the fifteenth century, was that
you could actually make the finished work from the
prototype. You could make a preliminary drawing if
you wanted to, but you weren't held to it; you could
work out all the details, and even make major changes,
as you finished the painting. (Design and Research)
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...
I didn't (obviously) use Franz Hals to support my statements about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century, since he worked in the seventeenth. I gave Hals as a counterexample to this claim by you:
This is not how people painted with oil until the
19th century.As a sketch that may well do the trick, but as a demonstration of drawing ability it's abysmal.
The thing that bites guy's ass is ridiculously sized if a lion was intended, and that front leg looks more human than animal (then again, he might be going for some mythological chimera-ish thing).
Overall, the drawing is confusing and I can't make out what many of the lines in the legs/ground area are supposed to represent.
Finally, this is not a casual doodle. Lines were drawn and refined several times over. If he was going for manierism or El Greco-ish stylization, fair enough, but still proves little about his ability to draw. If he was trying to achieve a render true to anatomy and perspective, I call fail.
I don't know whether Cézanne could draw or not, but I don't think this works as evidence that he could.
What about this one? Look like someone making mistakes in introductory drawing class to you? http://www.art-wallpaper.com/4056/C%C3%A9zanne+Paul/Sketch+a...
How about this? Beginner rendering perhaps? http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~3...
The problem is you can't quite bring yourself to admit that you picked a really bad example. You wanted someone who's technical deficiencies were made up for by their conceptual skill, and you chose someone who could draft their ass off and also had an incredible ability to choose fantastic things to produce.
http://www.navigo.com/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/sl/cezanne.coin-...
The color is wonderful, the objects are wonderful, but they are hovering above the table and the fruit on the platter is painted like it's going to roll out. The perspective isn't right either.
Does anyone else feel uneasy if they see a painting with wrong perspective? It totally destroys the beauty for me.
Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?
> There are forms of art where accuracy is prized, but in any kind of modern art, any rule can be broken if the result is interesting. > Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?
I do like Picasso's and Dali's work and also Cezanne's work. I even like the picture I linked to. But this is the key part:
> if the result is interesting.
I don't see how the wrong perspective and tilted platter add to the appeal of the painting. It seems to be an accident.
Certainly for me, a tilted bowl of fruit that defies logic is more interesting than a boring bowl of fruit. It still doesn't fascinate me incredibly, but it at least adds something worth thinking about. I'm not that well-versed in painting, however, so perhaps somebody more enthusiastic than I can explain to both of us what makes Cezanne so awesome?
Remember, we're talking about rendering here. Do you really think the woman's upper arm was that long compared to her head?
The third is subpar even for a beginner rendering. Almost looks like some early attempt at cubism. In a bad way.
Distortions and imperfections in the artwork convey the artist's subjective view of the world, and you need an artist for that.
Imagine a perfect rendering of what's depicted in Picasso's Guernica. It wouldn't work. And that came from someone who could probably do academic realism in a handstand and blindfolded ;)
I've experienced this. Since several years ago I've had tons of idea's for startups I'd like to create. Problem was, I had a business/finance/network engineer background and had no way of actually building anything. It's extremely difficult being stuck like that. Ambitions are polluted by your own limitations.
Three years ago a few close friends and I decided to develop a video game using XNA for Xbox 360. We were three programmers, two artists, and myself who handled game design (not a coder). It was a simple game. Basically, you were a guy on a board with a bat and would melee with others, trying to knock them off the board. It was sorta like Nintendo Hockey crossed with Super Smash Brothers in a top-down 2D view. Long story short, the programmers lost interest and the project died after two years of part-time work. The two artists and I were more or less helpless in trying to finish the game, so we had to abandon it.
This was a year ago and I was frustrated. I came to the realization that in order to build something, you need to have the idea, and you need to have a means of building it. So I ordered a bunch of books and started to teach myself how to program. Thats enabled me to work on a new startup.
Now I can see things much clearer having the ability to write code. That frustration of not being able to build your ideas, or having their destiny out of your control, is completely gone. It's empowering. This quote really rings true to me now:
The best programmers are the ones that combine in one head both the ability to translate ideas into code and having the ideas. Just like the best artists have both the ability ... (have) a great hand.
Saying Cézanne couldn't draw is a glorious form of missing the point, like saying Stravinsky couldn't hold a tune.
"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed." (easy refutation - go to sistine chapel, look up).
"What made oil paint so exciting, when it first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you could actually make the finished work from the prototype."
This is not how people painted with oil until the 19th century. It was a very expensive medium requiring careful preparatory work, sketches, and so on.
"Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it." - completely unsupported.
"Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium" - yes, carving marble is much easier.
"When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted." - again, this is how oil paint was used much later. At the time it was painted in thin, transparent layers that did not allow the kind of reworking you learned four hundred years later in art class.
And now we have 'Cézanne can't draw" to add to the list.
Many of your other statements about art fall more in the 'not even wrong' category - fatuous generalizations based on your own tastes, but presented as deep insights about the world.
So it is a little disingenuous of you to keep asking for people to point to specific places where you are wrong. The wrong is diffusely and uniformly distributed.
Art has progressed so much in the last 500 years that this comparison is utterly absurd. Francis Bacon comes to mind as a painter whose works simply cannot be compared to earlier pieces.
PS: In the tradition of things you can't say. Science killed philosophy as a meaningful activity. And the camera killed painting as meaningful activity. They have become the refuge of talented youths and over-educated idiots.
Second point: Define meaningful. Philosophy, science, photography, painting, all are essentially ways of passing time before death, if we want to use the cosmic scale; on the personal level each activity has different meanings to different people. I'm not a big philosopher, but I enjoy that much more than science. Science bores me.
Where is it written that philosophy can't evolve based on scientific findings? And what makes you think painting's not useful? Perhaps portraits aren't as meaningful, but even there, designing a web site for a musician I commissioned a painting of him rather than a photo. With paintings you can specify colors ahead of time and make something that fits for the design. So there's an example of an archaic medium being used for modern purposes.
I don't like very much your us-versus-them mentality here. I don't like your suggestion that there's such a thing as too much education. My policy is, to each their own. I'll continue to be fascinated by those over-educated idiots I call my friends, and you can continue to do whatever you choose with your own time.
I expect some refinement of an artist's craft over time. Just look at his faces. As a point of comparison my sister is a long way from mastery but he presents a reasonable progression for a HS student.
14 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Wired-Mother-Earth-273474...
15 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Deep-Sea-Gold-34634785
17 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Looking-Up-37173397
18 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Turn-Around-Turn-Around-1...
Bacon had some interesting ideas, but he lacked the skills to really explore them. IMO, that is forgivable for a dabbler or young person, but it's just not acceptable for a serious artist.
Second when looking for truth, philosophy is a dead end. You can still use a horse and buggy to get around New York but there is a reason it's become far less popular over time. Painting as a means to convey meaning from an artist to his audience has been similarly demoted because there are better ways to capture what you have seen. Leaving panting with abstract ideas better conveyed though words and meaningless garbage.
If you're really looking for truth, then you need at least a little bit of philosophy to tell you what you're looking for. (I don't know about you, but I wasn't born with any very good ideas about what truth is, or why I should want to look for it.)
In my experience, people who claim not to have any use for philosophy usually have philosophical opinions cobbled together from whatever ideas happened to be in vogue ~50 years ago (those that have now permeated into the general culture). Ironically, the whole idea that science has "killed" philosophy is an offshoot of the philosophical school of logical positivism from the first half of the 20th century.
Thomas Aquinas spent much of his life using the bible to make a hole host of philosophic treaties based on the infallibility of the bible. Then he realized that his entire work up to that point was "a house built on sand" and that for example trying to prove the existence of god basses on biblical teachings was pointless. He died in 1274.
He is not all that well known for making that realization, but if you actually read his work it becomes obvious that in his latter work he understood christian philosophy was simply a game he was vary good at. You can study fad's and paint a superficial picture of the development of philosophy but looking at what was published and what was popular does not in any way tell you when an idea was first conceived.
PS: I was 3 years old when I asked my mother why people believe in God. Not "is there a god" but why do people delude themselves. As a christian she defended faith, but I had already decided it was BS. So I assume a significant number of people throughout history quietly called the popular fictions of the day BS, and went about their lives. Suggesting that we needed philosophy to separate some truth from fiction seems pretentious when there is an ancient tradition of "losing the faith".
Well yes, that point of view is very old, but then so is the opposite point of view. I thought your point was more substantial than this, i.e. that modern science somehow invalidated philosophy. This point of view is obviously at least no older than modern science.
I'm not sure what your point is re Aquinas. He was a brilliant philosopher who is still very much worth reading (even if his prose is a bit tedious), so he doesn't seem like a good example of why philosophy is pointless. You certainly don't have to believe in the infallibility of the bible to get something out of his work.
Anyway, finding someone who in his youth wrote elegant treaties on the definition of justice says nothing about his latter beliefs and due to our limited lifespan from a historical standpoint they take place at about the same era. I said / wrote many stupid things as I child that I no longer agree with. All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end. However, once you understand that there is little more to be said on the topic unless you concoct a system that lets you ignore that fact. So you might go from "proving the existence of god' to saying it’s a question of faith.
PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines or a part of a far large hole. So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
What's your point? The idea of science as something separate from philosophy which could actually replace philosophy altogether is basically a 20th century one, and is certainly no more than a few hundred years old. (Science just wasn't impressive enough before then for it to be a reasonable point of view.)
>All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end.
I don't see how that follows. The vulnerability of initial assumptions is a problem for any form of inquiry, science included, but it isn't a fatal problem. Much of philosophy is precisely about questioning assumptions.
>PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines
I have no idea what you mean by this, but it doesn't seem to address Descartes' argument. (He was obviously not suggesting that anyone who merely says "I think therefore I am" must necessarily exist.)
>or a part of a far large hole
whole?
>So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
This is manifestly nonsense. Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. At the very least, the range of possible views, and the best arguments for and against these views, are much better known and understood than they were before. And in some areas (e.g. logic, and those aspects of the philosophy of science pertaining to it) there has been progress in a much more definite sense.
If you disagree then [citation needed].
Philosophy is the study or creation of theories about basic things such as the nature of existence, knowledge, and thought, or about how people should live. To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
PS: Skepticism is a philosophical attitude that questions the possibility of obtaining any sort of knowledge. It was first articulated by Pyrrho, who believed that everything could be doubted except appearances. (ca. 360 BC - ca. 270 BC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho
I think you are confused about where the burden of proof lies here. You are asserting the worthlessness of the entire cannon of Western philosophy (and quite possibly other branches of philosophy too). This is an incredible assertion.
By the way, why do you "exclude logic"? Logic has always been a central element of philosophy, at least since Aristotle.
>To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
Philosophy certainly includes some areas of math (for example, mathematical logic derives partly from work by philosophers). As for whether or not philosophical ideas "need to be tested", that is such a vague locution that it's difficult to respond. But certainly philosophical ideas are supposed to be subject to scrutiny (e.g. compared to alternative points of view, shown to be consistent, etc. etc.)
PS. Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. By the way, if you are interested in testability, you might want to read the ample literature on this notion in the philosophy of science.
Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. no I showed an example of "modern" skepticism that is over 2,000 years old. Think about this ~2,300 years ago people were having the same basic argument as we are having today I can think of no other field which has stagnated to that degree.
It's the "confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear" where the break from philosophy occurs. From the scientific standpoint you ignore the concept of life after death and other "perplexities of life" because it's not knowable. A true scientist builds models on what phenomena he sees and lays no clams one what he can't. Now you might question how that works with a paleontologist, but confining oneself to phenomena means a he thinks it's reasonable to look for patterns based on what your eyes tell you because they are not deceiving you even if they are not a window to deep truth. A paleontologist does not argue with the fact god could have created the world ten seconds ago, rather he argues "excluding unknowable things" this is the patterns I see. But, a philosopher sees no lines of inquiry outside of his purview and still attacks the unknowable questions such as life after death or the invisible god who does nothing.
PS: A better example from that time would be how a water clock behaves after you leave the room, if it displayed the correct time when you get back may have gotten up and danced about the room before you got back and hidden that from you but if that's the case it's an unknowable truth best ignored for visible phenomena.
So because all of his statements aren't prefaced with "sometimes it seems to me" or "I wonder if" or "Maybe it's the case that", then it comes across like he's speaking as if everything he says is absolute truth, whereas a lot of it is simply his musings about the world.
I totally understand why this rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Personally I prefer his current writing style, where he doesn't qualify everything he says with, "in my experience" or "among the artists I've known personally" or whatever.
With that being said, I can't comment on your factual corrections about the history of oil painting.
The "Hackers and Painters" essay is not about painting, nor the strict similarities between "hacking" and painting. It is about the fact that "hackers" do both design and development. This is different from the conventional notion of product development existing separate from engineering. The painting analogy is merely a (successful) vehicle for communicating this distinction.
I think this is obvious, and I assume you know it. The bitterness in your riposte, especially the invocation of sexual neener-neenerism, perplexes a bit. Perhaps as a painter you take offense to the imperfect use of painting as an analogy. This seems excessive. "Tomate un geniol."
(I am neither a "hacker" nor a painter.)
1. easy refutation - go to sistine chapel, look up
You're claiming that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is better (not just as good, but better) than everything Leonardo and Bellini ever painted. The number of art historians who'd agree with that statement is zero.
2. This is not how people painted with oil until the 19th century.
http://static.squidoo.com/resize/squidoo_images/-1/draft_len...
3. completely unsupported.
Your counterclaim is likewise completely unsupported. But anyone who wants to settle the matter can choose any "how to paint" type book published in the 20th century, and they'll see that was considered the default technique.
4. carving marble is much easier
Carving marble requires more specialized training, but the kind of difficulty I was talking about was how critically viewers judge the result. They are tough on sculpture too, but I think they are as tough on line drawing. The less there is, the more closely it's examined.
5. At the time it was painted in thin, transparent layers that did not allow the kind of reworking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...
6. If you want to offer any actual counterargument about Cezanne's drawing, feel free.
2 - I like Frans Hals too!
3 - Yes, that's how painting is taught now, to the kind of people who read 'how to paint' books.
4 - Nice weaseling.
5 - Notice how those carefully fixed errors show fully-drawn hands, feet, etc., rather than a cloud of "rough drafts" like you would see in a painting done in the modern style? Another nice demonstration of the point that oil painting was not a fluid, iterative medium in its first few hundred years.
6. Try one of the numerous image links in the thread.
As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:
""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.
(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.) The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""
Of course, Dr. Larkin gets one thing wrong. You're not a pre-Raphaelite, you're just a big ole weenis.
From what I can tell, Mr. Graham, at best, might be wrong about a handful of (evidently fuzzy) facts about painting. I do not see the logical bridge from that to his status as "big ole weenis." That's disappointingly puerile.
It's always helpful in discussions here on HN to have the courage to say something like that. Kudos for that. Thanks to those who have replied with specific answers. That puts lots of food for thought into the thread.
(That said, you can become good at just about anything with carefully cultivated passion and a dash of smarts.)
given that selection for "great art" is over a large number of people, why can't you find someone that is gifted in both areas?
perhaps one somehow counteracts the other (for example, you are praised for "mechanical skills" and so never learn "abstract thinking")?
or perhaps the market values the combination of "poor mechanical skills" with "great abstract skills" because it places the latter in strong relief?
or perhaps you do get people who are both (gerhard richter is the best example i can think of), but that's not enough to meet demand? (or meet fashion?)
or perhaps the numbers just don't work out - the population is just large enough for one or the other, but not both?
or, finally, perhaps the whole basis of the post is, in fact, false?
Afraid I don't know enough about programmers or painters to spout names, but in any other artistic medium you've got a mix of all types. I'll use film as my example because film's a medium in which you have a hundred people working together, and very elaborate roles evolved to let people do exactly what they want to do.
Some directors function as merely directors. They decide what they like, and they have other people execute. But other directors can and do insist on controlling other parts of the creative process. I'm not a fan of James Cameron, but the guy writes, directs, and edits his movies, and he's very involved in set design as well. Some props he insists on making himself because he doesn't trust anybody else to do it right. So there's a guy who knows what he wants to do, and is also capable of the incredible technical feats required to pull it off.
In this way of looking at things, I'll freely admit to being more of an implementer. If someone asks for what they want, I'll do my best to make the software do it in a way that's efficient and delights the user.
Given vague instructions, I'll do my best, but with mixed results.
But when I team up with someone who always has new ideas - I can actually sort through them, figure out which ones will work, which ones will meet the goals, and synthesize them into great product. Most people can't do that with their own ideas.
I think the original quote - and it's short, not a full essay, so this criticism is mildly unfair - elevates the innovator too much over the implementer. When in reality, you win when you have both, that know their own strengths and limitations, and are grateful for the other. I produce better work when I pair up with an innovator, and so does he or she. And the two of us will dominate over a dual-innovator team.
Also, realize implicitly in everything Paul Graham says, you can add the words, "For a startup technology company." That's what he knows, that's what he values. There's a lot of work out there that needs implementers, and innovators would be frustrated, unsuccessful, and miserable at. Don't feel threatened if you're not Paul Graham's Ideal Entrepreneur/Programmer. I'm not. I'll never be extremely rich, most likely, but I'm happy, good at my job, valued by my company. I say this because opinions like this caused me a _lot_ of self doubt in my early twenties, and they turned out to not be the accurate predictor of DOOM that I feared. If you're smart, and willing to do a good day's work, success is out there - not at a company run by someone like Graham, but he wouldn't have success at a company for you either.
What is this due to? Cezanne's skill with color? Or something else?