Hackers and Painters — A Great Prophet of the Information Age

Hackers and Painters — A Great Prophet of the Information Age

Even after nearly two decades—a span of time that, in the fast-moving information age, feels almost as long as two centuries—Hackers and Painters still gives off the fragrance of fresh-baked bread. Time has not stamped this book with the mark of “history”; if anything, it has only made it seem more vibrant and alive.

I think that when the book was first published, it was certainly already an excellent work. But compared with other books of its time, its foresight and vision may not have seemed especially extraordinary. Only now, when Apple has already begun preselling the iPhone X, when Python has long supported lambda syntax, and when WeChat Mini Programs have become an unstoppable force, does reopening this book and reading predictions written nearly twenty years ago produce a kind of astonishment and admiration that is hard to put into words.

Being a prophet is difficult; being a prophet in today’s rapidly changing information age is even harder. More than a decade ago, Yu Shiwei declared forcefully in a lecture: “Will Nokia fall? No! Will Motorola fall? No! The ones that will fall are the domestic brands!” And in the blink of an eye, Nokia and Motorola all but vanished, while Huawei rose to overwhelming prominence. I mention this example not to dig up an old video and embarrass Master Yu. Rather, who could have imagined that Apple would defy convention and release a phone, or that Google would throw Android into the mix and muddy the waters? Then again, if the future really is so hard to predict, wasn’t there at least some danger of misleading people in making such absolute claims in a lecture?

But back to the point: if the information age changes so quickly, how was the author of this book able to grasp the trends so accurately and make such predictions? Based on the book, I think the reasons can be summarized in three main aspects. First, of course, was the author’s own command of technology and his deep thinking about it. Second, he benefited from using the LISP language, which complemented his way of thinking extraordinarily well. Third, the technical field he worked in happened to align with the direction of the age. This was partly a matter of chance, but also surely the result of his wise judgment.

Of course, beyond the book’s accurate predictions about technological trends—some of which have still not been fully realized, suggesting that our present era has yet to fully catch up with the author’s thinking—the author also offers profound and practical insights into specific skills and decision-making. For example, according to The Mythical Man-Month, as an organization grows larger, communication barriers increase and team efficiency drops sharply. To solve this problem, the author takes the opposite approach: he advocates teams of fewer than ten people in order to maximize efficiency. But how can such a small team maintain its fighting power? This brings us back again to LISP. In the author’s practice, LISP was efficient enough to let a hacker (programmer) do the work of ten people, offsetting the disadvantage of smaller numbers.

Because of their structural nature, large organizations are often inferior to small ones when it comes to incentives, innovation, and freedom. Large organizations tend to adopt stable but inefficient measures in order to reduce risk. That is something small organizations neither can nor should imitate. Instead, small organizations ought to make use of their flexibility, choose the right tools and organizational structures, and thereby gain a competitive advantage.

From this perspective, combining the book’s theories with the realities of today, I think we can draw the following conclusion: in the foreseeable future, inefficient large organizations will either be replaced by efficient small organizations, or else be broken up into collections of smaller ones. Under this trend toward smaller units, small organizations must make fuller use of their own strengths and improve efficiency if they hope to compete with the giant behemoths that, though gradually declining, still possess enormous scale.

So should we all switch to LISP? At the very least, we should modernize ourselves to Python, I think.