The Fredösphere

Paul Graham has a provocative essay on hackers and how they write software.  (Tip o' the hat to Beautiful Stuff.)  His POV is that of the extreme hacker type, a familiar character in the programmer world:

All the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory....  Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry.

Painters can do a lot without theory, but a knowledge of chemistry would in fact not be useless, as Graham seems to admit:

You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library.  Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.

Now, here he adds architects to the mix:

If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Well, some painters and architects.  I believe the ideal is to organize in your head, then transcribe.  Mozart never revised or rewrote, and Frank Lloyd Wright famously prepared no preliminary sketches before he drew up the plans for Fallingwater.  David W. Galenson has written a whole book trying to separate artists into experimental innovators (i.e, sketchers) and conceptual innovators (i.e, uh, non-sketchers).

Anyway, what really caught my eye was the word maker.  I latched onto that word a while back as a good self-description, in an attempt to escape from the thinker-doer continuum that I felt I didn't really fit into.  I know I'm not a doer, yet thinker didn't seem right either -- the creation of theories does not interest me.  I love to design things, with production of a tangible artifact as the end result.

Oddly, as a composer, I count the score as a tangible artifact, not the performance.  Obviously, this is a grave disadvantage.  I do not take the kind of interest in my music that I ought, once I'm done writing it.  I really need a team of admirers, groupies, and sycophants to take on the job of getting my music performed.

Any volunteers?