Home › Authors › Paul Graham
Paul Graham Quotes
born 1964 England
Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo!
England Businesspeople Computer scientists Essayists Programmers Also known as: Graham, Paul, Hackers & Painters
Random Paul Graham quote
36 quotes
Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.
The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.
Consulting is where product companies go to die.
Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.
At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.
The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.
Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.
The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.
As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.
If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.
At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.
While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
Topics Paul Graham is quoted on