Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
The commenter did not say Paul Graham writes quickly, so I'm not sure why you keep fixating on that point.
> I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
Good lord. They said they like his writing, but found the particular tweet you shared pretentious. Your response to that light criticism is so disproportionate it reads sycophantic. This is a thread about good writing, I think criticizing anything is fair game.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.