Maciej Ceglowski, who for a while has been a member of my list of bloggers I desperately wish I could write as well as, has poked a well-aimed skewer into Paul Graham's essay, "Hackers and Painters". It's one of those articles where, in trying to find an excerpt to quote here, I had trouble finding any paragraph that wasn't a gem.
It's surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar.
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Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at slapping paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you.
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I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of shlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond.
It is, indeed, a pearler. The crack about Messrs Raymond and Winer, whilst harsh, just about hits the nail on the head.
Skewered indeed, and a healthy dose of realism administered in a rather delightful way.
Graham's essay reminded me a lot of something that would've been published at the height of the Dot Bomb era's geek sycophancy, and seemed somehow out of place in the aftermath. I appreciate the attempt to glorify the profession, but at the end of the day, we must still deal with obstinately concrete machines no matter how much we believe in the "programming as art" metaphors or how many words are spent on defining what, in fact, a hacker truly is.
Yup, after years of playing music at night and writing software by day, it wasn't until I was safely married that it was finally OK call myself a software developer and not a muso ;-)
Great link, ta!