Hackers and Painters

The always enjoyable Paul Graham has a new article entitled “Hackers and Painters”. He talks about “computer science” and “software engineering” as being misrepresentations of what hackers do. He draws the parallel, not surprisingly, to painters and other “makers”. It’s an interesting parallel. He’s downbeat on the notion of pair programming for certain:

When a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will end up being like a common-room. It will tend to feel bleak and abandoned, and accumulate cruft.

I don’t quite agree with this, because I think that the XP methodology has a process that works around this notion. However, I don’t think XP is for everyone, and it’s probably not for Paul Graham.

Software is an interesting beast, because creating it is both a creative process and a kind of engineering. Computers require very precise instructions… precision that is not as important (or necessarily even desirable!) in paintings, writing and music.