Intuition is why I learnt most of what I know about hacking came not from university courses () but from scouring the internet for interesting reading, studying open source and RFCs, and reading blogs. Intuition is why I come to HN and and stackoverflow (or formerly to the c2 wiki and usenet) instead of reading ACM journals.
The programming landscape is vast, and there are a 1000 ways to do the same thing, but a few of them are beautiful, and I want to know why, and what guided their design, and how should I think about these things.
Research is mostly silent on this, and when there is research it's hard to tell how credible it is.
Whereas if Bram Cohen writes something about networking, I listen up, because having created bittorrent is a way stronger signal of credibility than having an X citation index.
And yes, I'm deeply biased. E.g. I read Stevey's Rants because I share a lot of his beliefs, and love his writing style. So I get confirmation of my beliefs, and they may still be wrong, but at least now I have a good vocabulary* to discuss my beliefs, e.g. "liberal"/"conservative".
I loved the Unix style before reading TAOUP, but now I have clearer definitions - and names - for the qualities I admired.
BTW, the Jargon File is an early example of hackers seeking out a shared vocabulary of intuition.
(*) SICP was an outlier (as were some other courses my university borrowed from MIT). Written by exceptional hackers, talking about design principles explicitly, and exemplifying elegance on every corner (it wouldn't be half as great if it used CL instead of Scheme!). "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - SICP didn't cite research to support this intuition, but I'm ready to repeat this one as fact.
What was bullshit was an OOP course taught by a CS professor who doesn't code much and TA'd by a Java drone.
Intuition is why I learnt most of what I know about hacking came not from university courses () but from scouring the internet for interesting reading, studying open source and RFCs, and reading blogs. Intuition is why I come to HN and and stackoverflow (or formerly to the c2 wiki and usenet) instead of reading ACM journals.
The programming landscape is vast, and there are a 1000 ways to do the same thing, but a few of them are beautiful, and I want to know why, and what guided their design, and how should I think about these things.
Research is mostly silent on this, and when there is research it's hard to tell how credible it is. Whereas if Bram Cohen writes something about networking, I listen up, because having created bittorrent is a way stronger signal of credibility than having an X citation index.
And yes, I'm deeply biased. E.g. I read Stevey's Rants because I share a lot of his beliefs, and love his writing style. So I get confirmation of my beliefs, and they may still be wrong, but at least now I have a good vocabulary* to discuss my beliefs, e.g. "liberal"/"conservative". I loved the Unix style before reading TAOUP, but now I have clearer definitions - and names - for the qualities I admired. BTW, the Jargon File is an early example of hackers seeking out a shared vocabulary of intuition.
(*) SICP was an outlier (as were some other courses my university borrowed from MIT). Written by exceptional hackers, talking about design principles explicitly, and exemplifying elegance on every corner (it wouldn't be half as great if it used CL instead of Scheme!). "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - SICP didn't cite research to support this intuition, but I'm ready to repeat this one as fact. What was bullshit was an OOP course taught by a CS professor who doesn't code much and TA'd by a Java drone.