Annotations (4)
“99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection of popular programming languages. But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting.”— Paul Graham
Strategy & Decision Making · Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
Value concentrates in the exceptional margin
“Weird languages aren't weird by accident. Not the good ones, at least. The weirdness of the good ones usually implies the existence of some form of programming that's not just the usual gluing together of library calls.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Persistent weirdness signals unmet needs
“If you want to expand your concept of what programming can be, one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart, and then focus on the differences between this language and the intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others?”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Study outliers used by smart practitioners
“In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
New expressive capability enables new thought
Frameworks (1)
Learning Through Outlier Study
Expanding Domain Understanding by Examining Intelligent Deviations
A systematic approach to expanding your conceptual boundaries in any domain by identifying and studying outlier approaches that persist despite being unpopular, focusing specifically on outliers used by intelligent practitioners. The framework works by revealing capabilities and problems that mainstream approaches cannot address, thereby expanding the learner's understanding of what is possible in the domain.
Components
- Identify Persistent Outlier Approaches
- Filter for Smart Practitioners
- Map the Capability Delta
- Practice the New Expression
Prerequisites
- Solid grounding in mainstream approaches in your domain
- Ability to identify competent practitioners
- Willingness to feel temporarily incompetent
Success Indicators
- You can articulate problems that mainstream approaches cannot easily solve
- You find yourself thinking thoughts you could not have thought before
- You can translate insights from the outlier back to your primary domain
Failure Modes
- Becoming a permanent contrarian who rejects mainstream for its own sake
- Collecting weird approaches as trivia without extracting transferable principles
- Choosing outliers based on novelty rather than intelligent adoption
Mental Models (2)
Exploration vs. Exploitation
Strategic ThinkingThe fundamental tradeoff between trying new things (exploration) to discover better options and opti
In Practice: Graham's observation that 99.5% of programming is routine (exploitation) while 0.5% is genuinely nov
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Inversion
Decision MakingApproaching problems by inverting them.
In Practice: Graham inverts the usual learning approach
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Concepts (1)
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
CL_PHILOSOPHYTheory that language structure influences thought patterns and worldview; linguistic relativity
Synthesis
Synthesis
Migrated from Scholia