> I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Because they were humbling to me and I learned a lot from them, despite their clumsy writing style (not because

> I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Because they were humbling to me and I learned a lot from them, despite their clumsy writing style (not because of their writing style!). Imagine that you have worked several weeks on a problem, you are very proud of the code that you created that solves the problem elegantly; you document it with well-written, correctly punctuated comments and documentation. Then the smspeaker looks over your shoulder and says "dude, this data structure isn't necessary here, just use a table of integers and it will be faster and the code 80% shorter", which is a self-evident statement after the fact. THAT is humbling, regardless of whether the guy writes his mails in correct english or smsesque.