Author: grant

It is what you know that you don't know that matters most

The idea that “It is what you know that you don’t know that matters most” has been coming up a lot lately. Here is one fellow’s take on it via this post:

I have the the distinction of being the “programming languages guru” here at Dobbs Code Talk. So what does this mean to me? It means that after many years of programming and studying language design, I am reasonably aware about what it is that I don’t know about programming languages. Contrast this to something like helicopter mechanics, for which the only meaningful thing I can say is that I know nothing about it.
It is perhaps a dubious achievement to be knowledgable about the limits of your understanding, but at the same time I don’t really think you can do any better.

Agreed.

When you can't be lazy

When it comes to learning, and “doing things well” for it, you can’t be lazy. You simply can not be lazy.
You won’t get away with it. Eventually you will screw up. Maybe you will catch it, and maybe you won’t. Maybe it won’t matter to anyone else or maybe it will. The only thing that you should care about is that it matters to you because you want better for yourself.
You should always work hard and study smart and give yourself the time that you need to learn.

LaTeX Advice

While reading this article, it occurred to me that one ought to approach LaTeX coding much as one would code in any other language: re-use whenever possible.
Aspiring TeXnicians should get comfortable with searching for packages that contain the desired functionality, and using them, rather than starting from scratch each time.
Perhaps this is something of a no-brainer, but, it is very easy to get caught up in the fact that you are writing, rather then coding, while using LaTeX.

Funny story about the Java compiler

I had always wondered if it was .NET alone that had inspired Sun to add generics to Java. Perhaps, as you will see here, there was a little more to the story!

On slide 24 I mention Philip Wadler and Martin Odersky. At this point in the talk I repeated an anecdote that Wadler told me. After they had done the work on generics, Odersky was hired by Sun to write the new Java compiler. He thought the generics were a good idea, so he put them into the compiler. The Sun folks always ran the compiler with the generics turned off. But they couldn’t rip out the generics completely, because they needed them in the compiler in order to get it to compile its own source code, which was written with generics. So they had to leave the feature in, and eventually they started using it, and eventually they decided they liked it.