Reading through the article, and having no way to comment there, I'll comment here:
> It is true that both painters and programmers make things, just like a pastry chef makes a wedding cake, or a chicken makes an egg. But nothing about what they make, the purposes it serves, or how they go about doing it is in any way similar.
This misses the mark almost entirely, from my understanding. Hackers and painters CREATE something -- it does not exist and then it does. The wording Paul Graham uses is "makers", but it's not what I feel so maybe that is the criticism being expressed in this part of the article ?
The purpose of artists who paint and hackers /IS/ the same -- to create. To get what is inside of you out. To have the expression which has no form to take form and be in the world as something that can be shared with another soul. The methods are the same -- extract what is inside of you into concrete form, mold it, remove the bits that are not right, add more bits, move the bits around.
Certainly this is not true of computer programmers, which the article refers to hackers as but this is a failure of the article not of the original comparison. Nor is it true of all painters, since the word is too generic, which is a failure of Paul Graham's choice of wording for this comparison since based on the rest of the reading that is what he is referring to.
Computer programmers program computers, perhaps soullessly.
Painters paint things, perhaps soullessly.
Hackers hack because they need to.
Artists that paint paint because they need to.
As to the rest, I don't know if Paul Graham's intention was to attempt to borrow "coolness" from artists, but for me it is not. It's an attempt to explain why one must hack and why that is an identity and not an activity or a profession.
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm