Читаю эссе Пола Грэма Hackers and Painters (по наводке
avva). Большая часть того, что он пишет, удивительно подходит и к переводчикам тоже.
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?
One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don't learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Even in college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking.
Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you'll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there's something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting.
I think most makers work this way. Writers and architects seem to as well. Maybe it would be good for hackers to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch, instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.
( Read more... )А вот это вообще следовало бы высечь на мраморе золотыми буквами:
Great software, likewise,
requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way.
It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html