School For Hackers
#time 08-19-07 00:05
#keywords school, education, programming, hackers, academic
<blockquote>In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers 
and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along 
with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying 
to do is make good things...

Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters 
need to understand paint chemistry. You need to know how to calculate time and 
space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember 
at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or 
a regular expression library.
-Paul Graham</blockquote>

In this essay I will propose a school designed specifically for the type of 
hacker Graham talks about in his superb essay <a 
href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html">"Hackers and Painters"</a>. It is an 
experiment to see what educational theory might follow from the presumption 
that programmers are "makers" instead of scientists.


