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Where Have the Great Programmers Gone?
- dalke 15y agoIn any discussion of this sort, I am reminded of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould on baseball. His question, in essence, was "Where Have the Great Players Gone?" His answer was that in the beginning there was a huge range of skills between players, so those with the best skill easily stood out. But over time, as the game matured, the variation diminished. There were more and more really good people, so the difference between them and the best in the field diminished. Gould's explanation can be applied to any complex new field which undergoes maturation. For example, it also answers the question "Who is the Einstein of our time", by saying there are many people who are better at physics than Einstein; so many that they don't stand out. The author of this essay conjectures "the current educational environment militates against the discovery and nurturing of programming talent." I disagree. The 'current educational environment' means there are so many well-trained people that the exceptional and self-taught people do not stand out so much. As supporting evidence, the teaching of mathematical physics and of baseball have not seriously changed in the last 50 years, so the author's hypothesis cannot apply to those fields, while Gould's hypothesis does. Hence Gould's has more explanatory power. It may be that the 'current educational environment' is at fault, but there is insufficient evidence for that hypothesis in the essay.
- dalke 15y agoHere's Gould describing "The Disappearance of 0.400 Hitting" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBh2ZbEo0I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBh2ZbEo0I