gabriel

But this has nothing to do with age. I believe it has to do more with drive. Or possibly intrigue.

Whatever the word you use, it is a problem of the mind.

The biggest thing I look in with my peers is their capability to push themselves, which also pushes the others around them. The former is a goal, the latter is a side-effect.

Reminds me so much of Hamming's You and Your Research: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Oh, and yes, I'm in my early 30's and I suppose that makes me "Old", and I garner respect by the fact that I'm good at what I do and I tend to get shit right. But I also can act as a bridge between those who are younger and possibly less experienced (age != experience) and those who value age.

To be honest, I prefer to make a switch in "expertise" every five to seven years. This is a goal of mine to keep pushing myself otherwise I will get bored.

I really believe you get a lot better at seeing the benefits of patterns when you try to apply them in different languages and different contexts.

Are patterns something we should try to transcend in our learning? Meaning, you really do need to know them before you understand how to dismiss them in favor of something else?

I think you are looking for an exact quote but the link is to slides of a talk :(

I also agree with the sentiment, but you Architecture Astronaut will no doubt disagree.

You really can't just take a design pattern and apply it blindly across languages. I spend far too much of my time on a C# application where I have to deconstruct anti-patterns and make them more amenable to change.

I get the feeling from your post that you get this though. Because at some point you have to transcend your knowledge of Big-O, pattern languages, and go through those stages of being an Architecture Astronaut, second-syndrome, failing, failing better, and then maybe even succeeding in what you do.

Then things begin to get interesting.

I have a lot of problems explaining this to the people I work with. Most of the errors we make are in some way related to having imperfect information through the debugger.

At some point complexity gets so high the debugger isn't even capable of handling the system under inspection. What are the tools we use in these cases?

We pretty much don't communicate in any reliable way and insert all of these strange rules on our tracking system so things don't get lost.

Ridiculous.

Personally, I tracked file/package relationships with a simple script. Easy to do.

Tracking package dependencies is more difficult, and I usually did this manually with some help with some specialized scripts.

Plus side is you can avoid dependencies you don't like and add functionality where you need it. You can make a developers heaven this way. Usually the only way I do serious Linux development is with an LFS-based system. When I use distros I usually spend a lot of time creating a specialized environment and the time saving in using a distro is sort of nullified.

Bad side is obviously if you want to upgrade a vital dependency you'd have to upgrade all forward dependencies also. Not so difficult if you have it scripted, but errors are hard to handle. Of course, an LFSer would usually know how to install different versions of packages and have them co-exist. However, mostly you just want to keep top-level packages updated, which is easy to do (e.g. Firefox, developer tools).

I do know that the publishers didn't like the university doing this much. Also, it hindered the professors a little bit because they were pressured to keep their textbooks to a minimum and to keep the same text book for as long as possible, even if there was a good justification to switch. So, the text books had a reputation for not being the best things available for us students.

From a traditional OS level this isn't very useful because it's your job to implement the lowest-level capability of storing data. But what if you're already running inside of an OS that provides all of that stuff for you. Then you are free to implement all sorts of crazy abstractions that can directly apply to even greater problems, like network transparency and distributed objects.

Now think of this as PG has with Arc (http://paulgraham.com/core.html) by creating basic axioms for an object interface given the pre-existing facilities of working inside a traditional OS. Something that could run a desktop to running on the cloud and you have some intriguing problems to work on that cannot be addressed by current OSes.

I think there's a lesson to be learned from current database trends. It seems that no one is expecting a database to automatically achieve scalability anymore, so now we have all of those projects that provide a distributed interface to a run-of-the-mill RDBMS (I'm thinking of Amazon's Dynamo work).

So, yeah, throw out the file concept, and everything else that has a chapter title in your OS text book. Then you'll be able to find ways of working in new OS/language concepts and quickly arrive at great problems like the current concurrency terror and cloud computing.

Part of LLVM is an interest in correctness. I've seen more of an interest in these areas in research as well. For example, there was even a recent research highlight in an ACM magazine about "Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler": http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/compcert-CACM.pdf

Plus, newer companies like Coverity (http://www.coverity.com/html/research-library.html) bring a sense of credibility to a practice that hasn't had much traction in the industry.

I think all of these ideas can come together to make something quite useful. But I suppose bringing it all together is the hard part :)

Update: I also saw lots of cool associations to the Self Programming Language (http://research.sun.com/self/language.html), which includes some great research, especially in their paper "Self: The Power of Simplicity": http://research.sun.com/self/papers/self-power.html

I also wish the Singularity project had a friendly license. I also had to do a lot of work up front, so congrats on the work you've done! Truly cool.

I've actually used some of the concepts in this research for writing a secure distributed testing platform. So it has many applications outside of the operating system.

Really cool stuff is going on in this area between OS and languages.

"...what separates us from, say, Edmund Wilson? It is not taste; it is not even erudition. The profounder difference is the ability to place the products of literary work into a system of belief that appeals to something outside the literary work and the literary culture that produced it. This--not the status of the outlets for reviews, not their forum in newsprint or online--is what marks distinction in reviewing."

I think there is a general truth in this statement.

Some of the participants went to the Ivy League, but all of them went to highly respectable schools. There were a few points that I'd like to share.

Quite a few of the participants had a feeling like they screwed up big time in choices in their education. Not necessarily about the choice of school, but in, for example, choosing the English department instead of Literature and end up studying Theory rather than readings and after a few years they found out they missed out on Anna Karenina in favor of Foucault. This was to the extent that some of them claimed to go to masters school to make up for what they didn't do as an undergraduate, and regretted that too.

Another idea that they quickly agreed on is that the very nature of a regret is to notice what choices you should have made, and clearly it is too late to do anything about it. Yet, some of the participants were reluctant to even call them regrets. How can you call your life a regret? This is a group of people where there was no question that reading the right book at the right time would (and did) change their life, and it really wasn't a question of "for better or worse", but they would learn their lessons and are the better for it.

I suppose I'm talking about making decisions, reflecting on those decisions over time (sometimes it takes years, decades even), and then gaining a modicum of wisdom.

Feeling inferior would seem to me a common sentiment. Hasn't everyone had this feeling before? You feel like you missed out on something you may have not known existed until you had the years to figure out it was even there. Yet, I don't think you should deny yourself the line of thought that this would take you down, and it may take a long time, but I think you need to turn these feelings around to find a genuine calling/relaxedness of what you are here to do.

No affiliation with the publishers, but I highly recommend the $9 "What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions" (aka regrets) pamphlet: http://www.nplusonemag.com/pamphlet-two. It is well worth the money, especially if you are in the situation where you think you might be ready to hear their advice.

The word instead stuck out to me here, because I don't think these two qualities are an either/or quality.

Further, don't be so quick to demonize the rhetorician. Unfortunately the Rhetoric today is all but extinct, to the point that the word is used derogatorily, much like the word Hacker.

You want to make a difference today? Learn rhetoric. Take two weeks and research the term. Find the people who spoke directly to this issue. Your search will take you to the limits of the history of ideas.

I agree, xel02, that a rhetorician must not be solely a rhetorician. That would be like a Hacker who only chooses Hacker methods of communication and then wonder why he/she gets blackballed in the workplace and why no one listens.

Being an expert, by itself, isn't enough to entitle one to the responsibility of speaking for others. The rhetoric, lets now say the Politician, has the responsibility to make decisions for a group, and while these decisions require technocratic involvement, they have other non-technocratic elements to be considered.

Sure, that one story is usually by an established writer, which is also one of the most common complaints, but that story isn't going to be a fluff piece.

I'm OK if The New Yorker isn't the best magazine for fiction, there are plenty of other places to find new short fiction. You just have to know where to look.

BTW, I thought gabrielroth's comment was hilarious. A great response to a not so intelligent comment :)

Imagine being 19 years old and already identifying yourself as a poet. Maybe you spend your time writing love poems (ha ha, cliché right?), after all you'd be surprised how much something like this can be attractive. Imagine being this poet and going to a school that allows you to be taught by a world-class mathematician without any requirements other than sheer tenacity and zeal. I admit the first thing that popped in my head is that a poet might be one of the most enthused in such a situation.

After all, who is anyone to trivialize the pursuit of knowledge from motivated students who are by their very nature yet to be categorized or to have created a deep identity. It's like so many universities are swaying towards vocational training. No, I'm not making fun here, vocational schools have their uses, but one of the great things of a higher-education is the continuance of encountering things that you wouldn't otherwise find without the help of someone who knows the terrain.

Just imagine.

The exceptions are men and women who have realized that it isn't easy to control infants and a good mother will do what has to be done. Not so disgusting from my point of view (and I'm a guy in my 20's with no kids).

Difficult to quantify. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.

After 2 years in college I stopped taking notes and just started listening. My GPA went from Deans list to "average," but my learning increased exponentially (ever notice how science types like an excuse to use that work?). I did horrible in classes that were only about memorizing facts, like sociology, even though, I have learned now, that that was a horrible way to approach such an awesome topic.

However, I did excel in classes where I had an "endeavor to conquer the subject matter." Most notably, I ended up working way ahead of my CS degree without realizing it. I was just following a path of reading material with just a few conversations with good professors.

In the end, I learned how to learn. I don't really remember much of anything from any of my coursework (4 years out now). But I know how to learn it again if I need to, and more importantly, there is no topic that I fear approaching for the first time or repeatedly.