Paul Graham has published the whole of his delightful flight of fancy on how the IT world should work, a whirlwind tour through a never-never la-la land said to team over with Great Hackers:

What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

Yeah, right. So why do all the offers start their pitch by listing off the bad choices that must compose the solution? The simple truth here is everybody likes good tools; pipefitters, cellists, ice cream truck drivers ... but the reality is most everyone must make do with what they've got; the reality is those who front the money decide where it gets spent whether that's clay bricks or Cray-I's.

IMHO the truly great hackers, in any domain, make creative use of what they get, like Picasso's Baboon, or the Mexican artists who earn their keep turning trash tin cans into beautiful burnished mirrors and candle holders.

That's hacking.
"True entrepreneurs build their enterprise out of the bricks other throw at them"

I've been at this game 30 years and have never in my career seen anything like anything Paul reports as his everyday dreamland; you may have seen a luckier side of the world, but among what's come into my view, the only hackers with the lap-life of luxury Paul describes were either already of considerable personal means and fraternity bondings before they started, or they depended on a spouse or parent to afford their 'freedom', or some serendipidous happenstance had inexplicably swept them into a pop-stardom.

Beyond that, the closest I've seen to any employer so respecting of the creative space for that 1% source HR for the raw material of their corporate weath was later explained by an upper management on a great deal of VC limos and cocaine, and I don't need to tell you it fizzled just as fast as any of the NT shops. In my experience, the pop-fridges and games tables, skateboard hallways and hackey-sack tourneys, this was the Strangers with Candy your mama warned you about. Know the old saw about gift horses too good to be true?

By comparison, I've known oodles of success stories to have emerged despite the antithesis of Graham's world, shops pulled together from scant bits of opportunities scattered among thistles and thorns, fueled by the fruits of drudgery. For example, I know a shop in Toronto now who are doing excellent work, their creative pool working crammed shoulder to shoulder in the basement of a rented house ... because it was all they could afford.

True hackers don't care -- the play's the thing.

And I'm not even so sure it's even a help to be emmersed in a playland, cloistered away, isolated from reality. 'Pampers' after all, are training pants for babies and we all know no one strives for success as much as those working from a handicap. Google's core comes from their university years, many subsequent bits were 'acquired' through stories like Orkut (or their famous contests) -- if Googleland is so conducive to innovative hacking, why do they run contests to find new ideas? ... an innocent question.

I'll grant that a development infrastructure on NT is a fool's game, kiss of death for anyone who needs to actually accomplish an IT goal (and keep in mind, the majority of IT projects are to accomplish a shareholder goal, success of the actual bit processing is unimportant) -- but y'know, I'm also noticing how, among all the tools I use, know and respect, not a single one of them is written in Python. Not a one. Oh, sure, Peerkat was Python ... and it was so hap-hazard clunky it's been replaced, by Drupal, written in PHP, which is coded in C.

I'm not Paul Graham and I've never been asked to do a keynote, but in my limited experience in the scant 3 decades since I've been paying attention, 'hackers' seem to be so bent on knowing the innards of what they do, even if they are coding Prolog or Smalltalk, they see every high-level instruction flash before their eyes as a C-language skeleton, much like how a stone-cutter looks at a rock and sees the fine structure of geology.

That's why the only hackers using Visual Basic are the ones who wrote it. That's why a hacker doesn't care if you hand them a lisp machine, a Linux beowulf cluster or a vintage TRS-80 ... they know that, under the hood, it's all bits and op-codes, stacks and registers. Sure, as a free-software coder I like languages like Perl ... but it's because of CPAN, because, where licenses permit, most of my work is already done for me, in a format I can re-use yet still understand, and, being the intelligent maybe-hacker sort, I value the slack of it -- I don't want to do any more work than is absolutely required to do the task properly (as opposed to "to the given requirements" which are invariably hopelessly naive) -- given druthers, hackers choose the Path of Most Slack. Hackers choose free-software because it has long-range maximum slack ... and the posers don't even know what slack is.

I don't doubt that everything Paul says may have some obtuse foundations in shreds of truth; his essay was, on first read, the most depressing thing I've read in a long time, and sure as you'd bet it, if asked for my wildest fantasy job, he's hit the hacker's fantasy so bang on I expect his page to shoot to the top of the blogdex out of a deep global primal feeling that Disneyland should be the way of the world.

But back here on Earth, Disneyland is a fantasy world, and there is only one Google, and if all he's described is truly the daily Starbucked world Paul Graham inhabits, then I'm looking on with the greenest of the envy eyes, as are every top hacker I've ever had the pleasure of knowing, and we'll keep on banging with broken tools in our hair-shirts while quietly chanting The thousand cuts build character, the thousand cuts build character ...