Dark Knights
In the TED talks The mind behind Linux | Linus Torvalds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8NPllzkFhE&ab\_channel=TED
One of the comments that Linus Said was:
Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things — he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. But I think I’m more of an Edison than a Tesla.
Linus Torvals
So our theme at TED this week is dreams — big, bold, audacious dreams. You’re really the antidote to that.
TED Presenter
I’m trying to dial it down a bit, yes.
Linus Torvals
And the audience start cheering. I guess because it’s not common that kind of declaration in TED talks. In fact one comment in the You Tube video talk about that he’s “A true “Dark Knight”
This funny moment came to me while I was reading Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming because I ran Into the Peter Norvig interview where he talked about his famous essay: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years what was written in 1998.
It’s funny to remember that the motivation to write this essay is related (I guess) with the tech bubble that was growing at that time. So, for that reason a lot of content appeared that promise learn a lot of things related to tech in a short time. It’s similar with another things. If we take into consideration the 2021/2022 tear you could remember that the Crypto enthusiasm was as big as their crash months before. But the same happens with other technologies or buzzwords: 2014’s top ten technology buzzwords to learn and to avoid only for giving an example.
What Peter is talking about?
- In 24 hours you won’t have time to learn much. You could have a dangerous thing: a little learning.
- It takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas.
- The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes
Peter Recipe
- Make sure to have enough fun to don’t give up or loose your motivation
- Learning by doing
- Talk with other programmers
- Read other people’s code
- The college is not a must
- Work with other people from deafferents degrees: better and worse than you.
- Learn at least six programming languages.
- One language that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or C++),
- One that emphasizes functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML or Haskell)
- One that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp)
- One that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates)
- One that emphasizes parallelism (like Clojure or Go)
This is the most beautiful quote of all the book:
Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you do it for them).
Peter Norvig
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