I don't know about Chinese culture, but I am always amazed that so few people in software engineering actually understand the difference. I think that's the essence of the "being smart and getting things done" thing of Joel Spolsky. Things which would be obvious to most people here like "profile before optimize", "is this a symptom or the cause of the issue" are actually not that well understood in the large, unfortunately. All those are the symptoms of the same (lack of) skill for a programmer IMO.
Hmm.....the place where i studied cognitive science, one common theme of most experiments were global vs local be it on visual perception/language/etc......Wondering is local being extolled too much nowadays..... reminds me of the other post on "How not to scale?"
