Bad hackers copy, great hackers steal — Avi Bryant | Hacker News Reader

Bad hackers copy, great hackers steal — Avi Bryant

2010.cusec.net

42 pointshyfen5 comments

Good interesting video. Main theme is that it pays off to read research papers and try to use that stuff in the real world. Some interesting tidbits from Avi from the presentation:

* sun built java and self at the same time, self was an attempt to build a smalltalk that was more smalltalky than smalltalk, which ended up in that they made a very efficient dynamic method dispatch that was fast.

* There's no need for dynamically typed languages to be slow, because strongtalk has already solved that problem.

* The hotspot VM is actually the strongtalk vm, but crippled for fast dynamic dispatch because of the security model.

* There are now 3 really good and fast VMs for javascript making it very interesting.

* If a problem is hard, probably someone has a solution for it => research academic papers.

Off topic, but the title derives from a favorite line by T.S. Eliot. I'd always heard it quoted as "Good poets borrow, great poets steal." After a bit of Googling, though, it turns out that the actual line is "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." That's less punchy; I prefer the bastardized version. It's an interesting example of how evolution can strengthen and polish an original phrase. Who knows how many versions (and minds) it passed through before ending up with that perfect rhythm.

Still, the full quote more than makes up for it with the context, which is magnificent. Check this out:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

Fascinating; I've always heard it attributed to Picasso, as "Good artists copy. Great artists steal.", but Wikiquote has that as unattributed and cites Eliot in 1920. Picasso would have been 39 then and was established well before that, so it's possible it originated from him.

Then again, given the nature of the quote, it's entirely possible that he stole it from Eliot ^_^.

Thanks for digging this up! The full Eliot quote is indeed magnificent.

Dan, thanks for tracking that down. It's ironic (given the subject matter) that I didn't go to primary sources myself; I just went with the Picasso-attributed version from memory :)

Is there a transcript?

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