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[Michele Simionato]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<b9re3s$tbg$1 at slb6.atl.mindspring.net>...
> Robin Munn
> > Original URL for Paul Graham's article quoted above:
> >
> >     http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
> 
> One section says:
> ] The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how
> different hacking is
> ] from the sciences. Scientists don't learn science by doing it, but by
> doing labs and
> ] problem sets. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense
> that they're
> ] just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them.
> Eventually,
> ] they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers,
> from the start,
> ] are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original,
> and get good, and
> ] scientists start good, and get original.
> 
> I take some issue with that assertion.  A lot of my early hacking was
> neither
> original nor good.  Some of my earliest programs were: a program for doing
> gcd/lcm calculations, a lunar lander game, a prefix- postfix- infix-
> converter,
> and a BASIC implementation in BASIC.  All these were based on things I
> saw elsewhere and wanted to learn to do.
> 
> And in the sciences, I remember in 8th or 9th grade, being a fan of
> Heinlein, I wanted to calculate orbitals.  In retrospect, it turns out I was
> solving the equations numerically, although my timesteps were entirely
> too large.  That was original, because no one had taught me that technique
> (little did I know I would do molecular dynamics years later, using the
> same principles), but it wasn't anywhere near perfect.
> 
> I also don't understand why "doing labs and problem sets" isn't doing
> science.
> "Is there a relationship between the length of a pendulum and its period?"
> Yes, the answer's known, but it's as much science as the various projects
> I did as a kid were hacking.
> 
> Okay, getting off my soap box.
> 
>                     Andrew
>                     dalke at dalkescientific.com

I would say that the big difference between science and hacking is that
science requires a *much* bigger background. For instance, it took me
six months to reach enough confidence with Python to do some non-trivial
hacking. On the other hand, it took me ten years to reach enough confidence 
to do research in Theoretical Physics. There are other differencies, but
the big one is the difference in time scales. If I have a good idea about
Python, typically I can implement it in a couple of days, whereas if I have
a good idea about Physics, typically it takes me one year to write down
everything :-(


                                Michele