162 karma · joined March 25, 2013
Often repeated and attributed (apocryphally?) to Einstein but has never been true. Lots of scientists lack the skills required to explain their work succinctly to a general audience, and it doesn't mean they don't understand their own work.
> There was only one emotion he showed when I revealed I knew, and it was terror. Deep, deep terror he was struggling to conceal.
with
> I must admit the "fear" I thought I detected was subtle at best
you seem to have got a bit carried away in the telling of your story (which sounds to me like a rather standard one of someone taking advantage of another in a business situation).
Says who? Not all Christians think of god that way. You write as if you haven't thought about this much or spoken with many believers. Atheists aren't automatically entitled to the moral and intellectual high ground you know. I'd judge their "valuation of science and logic" the same way I'd judge yours (critically and carefully), and you don't get a pass because you believe in science. /An atheist.
What exactly do you think is exciting about BB's future (as a platform)?
At the same Not that I consider reading Proust a waste of time,
By that do you mean that it's difficult to do and you need to practise it? That sounds like a craft. I find it impossible to imagine the Mozart's Requiem or Sistine Chapel of software, much less of programming.
The functions of art include philosophical enquiry and invoking a sense of immanence in the receiver, and so on; creating a program might cause some of these things to happen in the programmer, but only as a coincidence. In his poem called The Scent of the Real, Alvin Pang writes "to bear clear witness/to your longing alone/[is] the only art/there is." Software doesn't do it either, other than as a potential medium for visual art or other forms. It seems likely that new, distinctively digital art forms will evolve, but even then it won't be "the programming" that corresponds to "the art".
"It's" is a contraction, Brainius.
> They say git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
It sounds like you've learned something about one domain, using high level languages to accomplish similar tasks. There is an awful lot more to learn, trust me. Hopefully you will take courses on operating systems, data structures and algorithms, building a compiler, etc. Learning different paradigms like functional programming and logic programming will give you different perspectives on computing and make you a better programmer.
I teach computer science to undergraduates and students like yourself sometimes have problems to start with (hopefully this won't apply to you). This can be because they've picked up bad habits (PHP?) or because you breeze through the first year and get bored or get in the habit of thinking they know it all.
Anyway, computer science and software engineering are definitely subjects worth studying at university level. There are deep intellectual challenges involved in mastering the material and universities are the place to tackle them. If you just want to get a job (programmer as tradesman, like a plumber or whatever), do that instead. There are some situations in which the tradesman might have an advantage over the scientist, but if you're going to write a system for me I want to know that you understand complexity and so on and so on.
Really? That's how I've always spelt it.