4 ms·

There's more to take away than that, although yours is one big tangible reason why he got left in the dust. The major point I got from this article is that you

by azanar 18y ago

There's more to take away than that, although yours is one big tangible reason why he got left in the dust. The major point I got from this article is that you can't stop being hungry for knowledge and expect not to get beat by those who are. The language didn't matter; he got bested by the people who kept learning and exploring while he decided he had learned "enough" for one lifetime. He made the mistake of making it about those around him; he didn't want to continually improve, just better than those he would be compared with. He went from learning just enough to best people, to being smug, to being a curmudgeon against other languages/platforms/etc he professed to not know a lot about. I keep seeing evidence around me that this is a very counter-productive shortcut to take, but one that most people don’t own up to; props to him for being honest, but sad that it took him too long to come to reason about it. In an odd way, I see this same pattern of behavior in a lot of the one-language-wonder Java programmers I meet today; they know Java, and find what reasons they can to declare that all other languages suck. So, your point about libraries is a good one, but I’d amend your remarks to advise cultivating an attitude toward development that makes using libraries and ideas of others almost instinctual, and that, I think, is by making sure you always stay hungry for knowledge.

jibiki 18y ago
I don't know how much you can cultivate that attitude, and how much it's just something you're born with.
- azanar 18y ago
  I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting you're receiving suggests that it is. There is a certain amount of one's desire to learn that is a matter of personality, and my understanding is that there is some degree of a person's personality that is determined by things other than socialization. Not all of it, but enough to possibly make a difference. The flip-side of this is that if there are people who, due to some or another in-born trait, are unable to cultivate an attitude of continued hunger for knowledge, that is something they need to deal with by not entering into a profession that demands it. And programming is definitely one of those fields. EDIT: silencing my own inner grammar nazi
  - lisper 18y ago
    > I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting your receiving suggests that it is. Yes, I agree. (I upvoted the comment.) A full response to this will take longer than I have right now (maybe I'll work on a blog entry later tonight). But for now, just for the record, my problem was definitely not that I was unwilling to learn new things. I love learning new things, and always have.
    - lisper 18y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546080 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546080
      - jibiki 18y ago
        > That's one of the reasons I hate Java, because learning Java didn't teach me anything except how truly brain-damaged a language can be. > I learned more in my one year at Google than in the previous thirty. This actually makes sense. It's not about being curious, it's about what you're curious about. I remember once asking one of my friends a very basic question about ring theory (whether a certain ring axiom is overly strong.) He completely refused to consider the problem, because it didn't seem relevant. That's not a lack of curiosity, just a lack of curiosity about irrelevant questions, and math is all about knowing which questions to ask. It's not like you learn nothing by solving the problem, just not anything you would have ever wanted to know.
      - azanar 18y ago
        Thanks for the perspective on this; it appears I did misinterpret what you wrote in the originally linked post, likely due to the lack of context you mention. The reaction I had to this was primarily due to me seeing in this post the stories of countless other developers who stagnate but then don't have the self-reflection to realize that they have, and don't have the motivation to get themselves out of the hole they've fallen into. While attempting to motivate the Lisp community to wake up and get working, in my mind you unintentionally created an anthem to all of them. Hopefully my initial response to this makes a little more sense. :-)
- whughes 18y ago
  The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency. Can you get to that instinctive level? I don't know, but I think that a person could certainly try and achieve a good level of competence. Saying that it's an accident of birth discourages hard work and encourages the idea of 'innate hacker skill.'
  - jibiki 18y ago
    > The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency. Whether a statement is true or false is independent of what it encourages. Let's assume that curiosity is totally hard-wired. Then is it really a good thing for someone to try to become more curious, instead of investing that effort into something else?
    - ahoyhere 18y ago
      And just because it's "from birth" doesn't make it "hard-wired," and even if it is "hard-wired," that doesn't mean it can't be rewired and worked around. Neuroplasticity FTW. The human brain is a most adaptable tool. But that said, how many infants are 'incurious'? They either are curious, or there is something wrong with them. No baby is incurious without some kind of pathology.
nostrademons 18y ago
You can take this too far. For me, the interesting part is in the hunger for knowledge itself, and not what we do with that knowledge. That's led me to pretty much reinvent myself as a programmer every year - I went from doing Java Swing apps, to PHP webapps, to Netbeans plugins, to Haskell compilers, to JSF webapps, to Python/JavaScript Web2.0 startups, to a big C++ codebase in about 8 years (the last 5 are all in the last 3 years). The problem is that there's a whole lot of stale knowledge rolling around in my brain. I pray I will never have to use the JSF/Facelets/A4J stack again, but I spent a year becoming pretty familiar with its intricacies. Meanwhile, my coworkers who joined Google straight out of college are way ahead of me, because they didn't take all these detours through dead technologies. There's a balance to be struck. You need to be hungry enough to viciously attack new problems, yet not so hungry that they become an obsessive end in themselves.
- azanar 18y ago
  I am somewhat of the same way with having a hunger for knowledge itself. I've found that what happens when I go from technology to technology isn't so much a reinvention as an augmentation. Maybe your experience has been different, but I've noticed an increasing depth in my analysis of systems, and I can't help but think that a part of this is due to the knowledge I've picked up in the meantime, even if it seemed tangential at the moment I learned it. To borrow some other authors words, it's partly why Peter Norvig, the Pragmatic guys, and ESR all push for people to learn different languages; your memory of the syntax might be ephemeral, but your internalizing of the concepts might change your thinking in ways you don't consciously notice. This poses an interesting, and very difficult, question to answer: how do you know whether something learned now will be useful in the future, especially if few other seem particularly interested? Over time you might develop an intuition for which things seem like they would be useful, but I can't imagine such an intuition would be perfect.

by azanar 18y ago

jibiki 18y ago

I don't know how much you can cultivate that attitude, and how much it's just something you're born with.

azanar 18y ago
I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting you're receiving suggests that it is. There is a certain amount of one's desire to learn that is a matter of personality, and my understanding is that there is some degree of a person's personality that is determined by things other than socialization. Not all of it, but enough to possibly make a difference. The flip-side of this is that if there are people who, due to some or another in-born trait, are unable to cultivate an attitude of continued hunger for knowledge, that is something they need to deal with by not entering into a profession that demands it. And programming is definitely one of those fields. EDIT: silencing my own inner grammar nazi
- lisper 18y ago
  > I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting your receiving suggests that it is. Yes, I agree. (I upvoted the comment.) A full response to this will take longer than I have right now (maybe I'll work on a blog entry later tonight). But for now, just for the record, my problem was definitely not that I was unwilling to learn new things. I love learning new things, and always have.
  - lisper 18y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546080 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546080
    - jibiki 18y ago
      > That's one of the reasons I hate Java, because learning Java didn't teach me anything except how truly brain-damaged a language can be. > I learned more in my one year at Google than in the previous thirty. This actually makes sense. It's not about being curious, it's about what you're curious about. I remember once asking one of my friends a very basic question about ring theory (whether a certain ring axiom is overly strong.) He completely refused to consider the problem, because it didn't seem relevant. That's not a lack of curiosity, just a lack of curiosity about irrelevant questions, and math is all about knowing which questions to ask. It's not like you learn nothing by solving the problem, just not anything you would have ever wanted to know.
    - azanar 18y ago
      Thanks for the perspective on this; it appears I did misinterpret what you wrote in the originally linked post, likely due to the lack of context you mention. The reaction I had to this was primarily due to me seeing in this post the stories of countless other developers who stagnate but then don't have the self-reflection to realize that they have, and don't have the motivation to get themselves out of the hole they've fallen into. While attempting to motivate the Lisp community to wake up and get working, in my mind you unintentionally created an anthem to all of them. Hopefully my initial response to this makes a little more sense. :-)
whughes 18y ago
The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency. Can you get to that instinctive level? I don't know, but I think that a person could certainly try and achieve a good level of competence. Saying that it's an accident of birth discourages hard work and encourages the idea of 'innate hacker skill.'
- jibiki 18y ago
  > The problem I see with talking about that attitude-from-birth is that it encourages complacency. Whether a statement is true or false is independent of what it encourages. Let's assume that curiosity is totally hard-wired. Then is it really a good thing for someone to try to become more curious, instead of investing that effort into something else?
  - ahoyhere 18y ago
    And just because it's "from birth" doesn't make it "hard-wired," and even if it is "hard-wired," that doesn't mean it can't be rewired and worked around. Neuroplasticity FTW. The human brain is a most adaptable tool. But that said, how many infants are 'incurious'? They either are curious, or there is something wrong with them. No baby is incurious without some kind of pathology.

nostrademons 18y ago

You can take this too far. For me, the interesting part is in the hunger for knowledge itself, and not what we do with that knowledge. That's led me to pretty much reinvent myself as a programmer every year - I went from doing Java Swing apps, to PHP webapps, to Netbeans plugins, to Haskell compilers, to JSF webapps, to Python/JavaScript Web2.0 startups, to a big C++ codebase in about 8 years (the last 5 are all in the last 3 years). The problem is that there's a whole lot of stale knowledge rolling around in my brain. I pray I will never have to use the JSF/Facelets/A4J stack again, but I spent a year becoming pretty familiar with its intricacies. Meanwhile, my coworkers who joined Google straight out of college are way ahead of me, because they didn't take all these detours through dead technologies. There's a balance to be struck. You need to be hungry enough to viciously attack new problems, yet not so hungry that they become an obsessive end in themselves.

azanar 18y ago
I am somewhat of the same way with having a hunger for knowledge itself. I've found that what happens when I go from technology to technology isn't so much a reinvention as an augmentation. Maybe your experience has been different, but I've noticed an increasing depth in my analysis of systems, and I can't help but think that a part of this is due to the knowledge I've picked up in the meantime, even if it seemed tangential at the moment I learned it. To borrow some other authors words, it's partly why Peter Norvig, the Pragmatic guys, and ESR all push for people to learn different languages; your memory of the syntax might be ephemeral, but your internalizing of the concepts might change your thinking in ways you don't consciously notice. This poses an interesting, and very difficult, question to answer: how do you know whether something learned now will be useful in the future, especially if few other seem particularly interested? Over time you might develop an intuition for which things seem like they would be useful, but I can't imagine such an intuition would be perfect.