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Knowing what you don't know is pretty important, because then you know when you have to go look something up rather than rely on your memory. When I have to ca
by pklausler 11y ago
Knowing what you don't know is pretty important, because then you know when you have to go look something up rather than rely on your memory. When I have to call mmap(2), I know that I have to read "man mmap" first, because I know that I just can't remember the order of the five arguments, or if that's even the right number. I've been working with UNIX type systems for 30 years or more, and have worked on the guts of three different kernels on many different architectures, but when I say that I know UNIX, I think that I mean that I really know where the stuff I need to know is described in the man pages.
- lsiebert 11y agoIt's important to have approximate knowledge of many things, including how to look up and figure out the shit you don't know. That said, I think you balance assumptions vs knowledge in order to be effective. Like you assume that it's in the man pages, and the man pages describe the code that is being used on your system, but it's entirely possible that your version of vim or whatever is different then the one described in the system wide man page.