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Eric Sink v. Paul Graham

Paul Graham recently posted an essay describing the qualities of a class of programmers he calls “great hackers.” Eric Sink wrote a response about why such great hackers might not make such great employees. Both essays are worth reading for software types.

One funny coincidence—as an example of an important but uninteresting task at SourceGear, Eric says he is procrastinating on “some enhancements to our online store website.” I wonder if Eric is aware that Paul made his name as the architect of Viaweb? Yahoo acquired Viaweb in 1998 and turned it into store.yahoo.com. Incidentally, Viaweb may most successful Lisp application ever - it certainly has more users today than Emacs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2004 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Eric Sink v. Paul Graham”

  1. Gordon Weakliem Says:
    August 5th, 2004 at 3:05 pm

    The other thing I though was ironic is that Eric’s extrapolating about Paul’s disregard for the customer. Paul wrote in another essay about how he used to fix bugs a customer discovered while on the phone. Eric’s post is true enough, but I think he’s putting a few words in Paul’s mouth.