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It's like math. You don't believe the difference between the best and the rest until you meet the best. It is apropos that someone linked to a Terry Tao math
by pmb 14y ago
It's like math. You don't believe the difference between the best and the rest until you meet the best. It is apropos that someone linked to a Terry Tao math post in this discussion, because right now, in math, Terry Tao is definitely in the "best" category. Unless we have chased the people like him away from programming, they must certainly exist in our field as well. However, our works are largely anonymous, which means that it is much harder to tell who is the best.
But Rob Pike probably is up there.
- tluyben2 14y agoIndeed; I thought I was very good at math until I landed in a course where there was this guy who just instantly grasped everything and it's consequences without having ever seen the subject we were taught. It was great talking/working with him but it deterred me from pursuing math as major; I reasoned that if there is someone so incredibly brilliant that he can replace this entire auditorium by himself, what am I doing here? I was very young at the time and I now know that brilliance by itself is not enough. He is not working in math now but is a programmer somewhere; so him replacing the entire auditorium for math didn't happen. For super programmers (definitely there are plenty of them like Carmack) this of course does not fly; one super programmer can maybe do the work of the entire auditorium, however the rest of the auditorium is needed as well as there is a shortage. Which is different from math, physics etc.