Learn from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library

Summary

• We learn by looking at other peoples work.

Details

• For painters, a museum provides a library of techniques and a source of inspiration
• for writers, we read other peoples work
• programmers can look at other coders open source code
• trying to paint a painting by a master is a form of education

References

• Painters and Hackers - Paul Graham

Quotes

The other way makers learn is from examples. To a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs—not just at what they do, but at the source code. One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Another example we can take from painting is the way that paintings are created by gradual refinement. Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Gradually the details get filled in. But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in x-rays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.

Related

• Inspiration and creativity
• Where to find inspiration
• Creativity based on inspiration from others
• Copying text makes you become more intimate with the passage
• An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people - Adrienne Maree