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> you have to understand design to be a good hacker If PG means graphical design, I don't think this is true. Looking at the list of hackers in Coders At Work
by ntoshev 17y ago
> you have to understand design to be a good hacker
If PG means graphical design, I don't think this is true. Looking at the list of hackers in Coders At Work (as a random sample of respected programmers), it is not clear if any of them understands graphical design and they typically have ugly homepages.
(Jamie Zawinski, Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, Joshua Bloch, Joe Armstrong, Simon Peyton Jones, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, L Peter Deutsch, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen, Bernie Cosell, Donald Knuth)
- jgrahamc 17y agoI doubt he means graphic design.
- ntoshev 17y agoDesign in an abstract sense that encompasses both visual and systems design probably includes designing programs (coding) as well. So it doesn't say much.
- tumult 17y agoThis is just my personal opinion -- after TeX and real typesetting, typography on the web is so hideously ugly that when confronted with the prospect of a mostly-text website, a disheartened shrug and some basic HTML just to get the characters on a page is all that can be mustered.
- JeanPierre 17y agoI always thought of it more like architecture and mathematical formulas. You don't have to be a good graphical designer to know what a good mathematical formula or a bad is. However, for mathematicians, a simple and elegant formula is much better than a complicated formula which requires much more work and gives the same answer. I think Graham answer what he consider as good design in the link below, you should check it out: http://paulgraham.com/taste.html http://paulgraham.com/taste.html