Comments on: In Which Amy Encounters a Superior Mind, Recognizes (Again) Her Own Incompetence, and Rededicates Herself to Alleviating the Problem, Though Not Without Some Concern About When She’ll Actually Find the Time to Do So

By: regeya

regeya — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:57:39 +0000

I’m making this comment as an outsider. I’m one of those people who dropped out of CS in college because he sucked, and went on to get a liberal arts degree. I stumbled upon your site looking for some materials on Ruby metaprogramming (DT’s pickaxe book sucks in this area.)

I wasn’t heart-broken by that decision, though, and looking at Steve Yegge’s website reminds me of one of the reasons why.

In my opinion, it’s not right for a person to be cocky about something like “if you don’t know how a compiler works, you don’t know how a computer works” then go off and gush about Java and (ugh) Lisp. Java’s somewhat heavy just because it has to have its layer of VM hardware abstraction on top of the OS’s layers of abstraction, and Lisp, well, Lisp encourages things like recursion.

What little I did learn about the workings of computers I learned by working with assembly language and macro assemblers on Intel hardware. Wish I’d worked with more, but at this point I don’t feel the need. Anyway, after learning a bit more, later in college, I realized just how evil recursion can be, and stayed away from it like the plague.

When you call a routine from the routine, aka recursion, you’re causing the system to need to save the state of your call, so it can call itself again. Then if that call recurses (let’s say you’re doing a recursive binary tree traversal, say) you’ve got to save the state again…before long, you have a big ol’ stack of state info. And you have to recall that when function calls start returning.

So that’s the main reason I don’t like Lisp. That and getting to a uni level after learning a bit about assembly on x86 and a teensy bit about compiler design, and having these ex-hippie math profs that were teaching comp sci who went on about “elegant” languages and how computer processing power and RAM were increasing, so it was a non-issue…blah, I don’t care that I couldn’t do proofs of my algorithms, I didn’t go into that line of work because I knew I would be going into a workforce of overeducated idiots who thought the elegant solution was the best.

And now about the only thing I ever code in is Ruby. Oog.

I suppose I was destined for the early PC revolution and missed it because I was still a kid at the time.

(and no, Steve Yegge doesn’t seem all that cocky. he just reminded me of something, that’s all. :->)

By: amy

amy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:53:46 +0000

oh yes, absolutely. And it’s certainly emotionally easier to start out from the position that you suck at something and are only just barely muddling along than it is to pretend to people that you know what you are doing all the time and then exert most of your effort trying to make sure they don’t find out how much muddling you’re doing. So I feel like it’s great and freeing and makes me a better developer to just be able to say “yes, I suck, I don’t know jack, i’m doing my best, I’m learning what I can, and let’s get to work.”

By: Colin Bartlett

Colin Bartlett — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:05:46 +0000

I’ve always liked G K Chesterton’s maxim that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. (Seriously – I ought to use it more than I do.)

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more. I have far too many “incompetent” moments, and although they’re somewhat depressing, they also push me to learn the thing that made me realize I was incompetent. From that I’ve learned a lot. More than I would have if I had thought nothing of it in the first place.

By: Mike Breen

Mike Breen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:38:44 +0000

http://secretgeek.net/inadequate.com

This always changes my mood when I’m in “beat myself up” mode.

(just plug your favorite technology for the MS buzzwords Leon uses, works the same)