[maxtollenaar]

My favorite Knuth quote: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."

source: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

[freewilly1040]

I like how it's a nice articulation of a preference that doesn't denigrate people who have the opposite preference.

[nolok]

There are actually two of those in that sentence. The one about emails, and the one about doing the long understanding study.

[JimboOmega]

I feel completely the opposite.

Not that email or any of the million other apps don't produce constant interruptions - but in terms of what I want my role to be and what I find pleasure in.

A world of high stimulation and constant social interaction? A million things shouting at me and I have to sort through them and grab the most important one and hop from thing to thing fast? That's what I like.

Focusing on one topic for hours, days, even weeks to really understanding every facet of it? I think it'd kill me. I know people theoretically need these big blocks of uninterrupted time to get work done, but I'd much rather have a bunch of meetings where we can figure out the path forward.

I have mad respect for him... but I never could have been an academic.

I like to take in all those digested kernels of knowledge, I like to digest as many of them as I can; I know I lose the details, but integrating them all into something bigger has always been my dream; it's just how I live my life.

[nambit]

It's only after you've developed a deep understanding that any efforts at integration would be successful. If you just like orchestrating, that's fine but I've met too many managers/product managers who think up lofty ideas on how to integrate various pieces without a deeper understanding of the underlying technology.

[sharadov]

Yup, been around a lot of them, they are the ones who love to sling words around and are a prime definition of tech bros always looking to debate not on the basis of firm knowledge but as a cover-up for their inadequacies.

[JimboOmega]

One of the signs that you're actually good at operating at this level is you spend more time listening than talking. You need people who actually know more than you - if you are always arguing and trying to prove you actually do know best, you're definitely not looking for that.

[godzillabrennus]

I have seen the other side of this where the developers trying to implement business requirements in code are making bad assumptions and end up in confrontations with middle management because their technically "pure" vision for how something should work doesn't solve the business goal.

[nambit]

Yeah. Seen this happen too. That usually points to a lack of (good) senior leadership in the dev team (senior developers not product/managers).

[sbov]

I like both.

The problem I find with surface level knowledge is you make a lot of mistakes. When I have a surface level knowledge of a piece of tech and make a decision based upon that, then talk to someone with deep knowledge it's pretty common for them to say "why didn't you just do XYZ, it's easier/more robust".

Ultimately you can produce OK or even sometimes good solutions to problems but not great ones, unless you have direct access to people that know more than you.

This becomes even more pronounced when different pieces of tech can be combined with eachother.

[JimboOmega]

I simply do make a lot of mistakes in most domains of my life.

I'm ADHD (diagnosed, etc), and medication did help, but didn't solve it. For much of my life, I fought against this natural tendency. But for most part I essentially kept telling myself "pay more attention"! It didn't work.

Compensation is important. Detecting the mistakes I make, and avoiding situations where the cost of them is very high. One part of that is accepting things I can never do, like be an academic :).

In the engineering world there's lots of means of compensating. One you mentioned; knowing people who know more than you. Another one would be automated testing; at almost every workplace I've had, I have put a lot of effort into expanding and increasing it, and generally detecting errors wherever they might occur. I'm always asking "what if there's a typo somewhere, will we know, will that go to production?" Might I create a PR I think I've tested but I haven't? The odds I've done this are higher than my peers, so I need to protect myself from that.

If I'm at a workplace that values accuracy above else - that views being able to focus on the code and get the best (not "good enough") solution to every problem as the main trait that I'm evaluated on, I will not succeed. I'm never going to be the guru of anything. This kind of sucks, because a lot of places view being really good at those things as necessary before you can move to another area (IE, management) where you don't use those skills.

I'm a "good not great" or "move fast and break things" kind of person. My usual working style is to produce prototypes very fast; then whoever I'm making it for can see that I didn't quite read the design thoroughly and miss something before it's a huge disaster.

I need the feedback of fast release cycles. I can detect errors fast, take action fast, fix them fast. But "take your time and make sure it's perfect before you throw the switch"? That's just not my personality. I'm high volume (when not artificially constrained) but error prone.

I'm smart enough to know it, smart enough to insist that my code gets reviewed, smart enough to say we really have to test for these cases, things like that. But it's absolutely something I have to compensate a lot for.

[nkingsy]

I don’t have ADHD but I can relate to feeling that deep knowledge is inaccessible to me. My issue has always been around some kind of internal optimization function that is always asking “how will this help me”?

A solution that’s worked well for me is to only study deeply when I have a concrete need.

For example, when I felt my work suffering because I didn’t deeply understand z-index, it was easy to sell my brain on reading the complete z-index spec.

One of my hobbies is music, and I’m just starting to feel the limitations imposed by not understanding music theory deeply. That means it’s a good time for me to study music theory.

Some people feel compelled to learn things. I feel compelled to do things, and if I can’t do something as well as I want to for lack of knowledge, then I know I’m ready to learn things.

[JimboOmega]

Motivation is a super important factor for me. The gap between what I can accomplish when I care about somethin versus when I feel it is an obligation or requirement is huge. Thankfully the latter, combined with being smart enough to cover mistakes, has been good enough to keep me from failing things or getting fired, but it's a definite challenge.

Confuses the hell out of employers, too. "You did a great job on X, you really improved things, but when we put you on Y, you totally halfassed it" - because X was my idea, and Y was forced on me. I respect the (social) contract that you are my employer and I should do what I'm told; I know at least mentally I should try to excel on any task given me, but it's just so hard to invest in those kind of things.

Anyone can get demotivated; it's just that the gap for me is bigger than people are used to. I'm not blaming my employers here, to be clear - thinking that way does me no good, anyway(+). While the vast majority do a terrible job of recognizing the motivations of employees - and anyone can get demotivated - I'm going to be way worse at this than the average employee and it's up to me to compensate.

Another strategy: I learned early on ANY social context is motivating for me. So I try to schedule regular checkins, even if the org doesn't mandate them. Even a few minutes of a manager explaining the next project will yield much better work than getting a ticket thrown over the wall. Constantly engaging with others and feeling like they are personally depending on me is one of the most motivating things out there - so I have to keep reminding my bosses that YES, I do want to be in all those meetings.

I will say on the subject of learning - I mostly agree with you. I learn all the time in a huge variety of fields, and when I need to learn new tech to accomplish a task I relish it. But if I try to make myself learn something because it would push my career ahead? Force myself to devote some number of hours to a project in a new language, something like that? It's like pulling teeth. I can't get into it.

(+: In general, if the world discriminates against you, is difficult for you, etc - whether or not it's truly worse for you or a perception you have, it doesn't matter to you - what matters is how you react to it. Sitting at home crying how about how it's not fair will never benefit you.)

[spiralx]

Thanks, as someone else with ADHD this is almost entirely spot-on with regards to myself, although I'm perhaps overly anal about the code I work on as a defence mechanism - which sometimes leads to focusing on the minutiae and missing other issues :)

> I need the feedback of fast release cycles. I can detect errors fast, take action fast, fix them fast. But "take your time and make sure it's perfect before you throw the switch"? That's just not my personality. I'm high volume (when not artificially constrained) but error prone.

So true, and it's made past jobs very hard work, most especially before I was diagnosed at age 31 and had the benefit of medication and being able to formulate better coping strategies :)

[zhoujianfu]

Me too.. in fact I just started imposing on myself last week a MWF: on top of things, TTh(plus weekend if available): on bottom of things. Hence here I am on HN on Monday!

[tlrobinson]

Out of curiosity, what is your profession?

[JimboOmega]

Software Engineer who dreams of being in some kind of management some day.

[Aeolun]

My thing is. Those meetings are great, but they are pointless until we know what we’re talking about...

[samstave]

Thats an amazing quote.

Reminds me of a "hermit-like wizard in his tower in solitary uninterrupted study of their craft."

[schwurb]

I once used two weeks of vacation to learn category theory - that was a really fun and rich time. It really relaxed me, but it also brought me more knowledge than one year of shallowly engaging with the topic.

[james_s_tayler]

I've heard many times on HN people bring up category theory and how beneficial it has been to learn it, so I've recently ordered a textbook on it.

Can I ask how has it benefited your thinking?

I'm curious to know not only how it benefits an understanding of software development, programming languages and functional programming, but also has it helped you understand the world at large in new and novel ways?

[whatshisface]

If category theory is your first exposure to proofs and logic it can benefit you a lot, although number theory might be a more fun and more concrete way to get the same result. If you know a lot about more than one field of math, as a great big generalization over everything category theory can also help.

I should warn you that there is a social bias towards saying that you found a lot of insight in studying something, and a bias against saying that studying it was a waste of time, irrespective of whether or not the thing is actually helpful. Aristotle could stare at a rock and end up with some insight, so anyone who stares at a rock and admits it hasn't helped them has to publicly admit they are not as smart as Aristotle. They say this is how geology got started. ;)

[leereeves]

Aristotle might have been able to stare at a rock and say something clever, but most of his ideas about science were wrong, starting from the very definition of science, which he believed should be based on unprovable first principles (like mathematical axioms).

He rejected atomic theory, believed the Earth was the center of the universe and the four fundamental elements were air, fire, water, and earth, and thought heavy objects fell faster and moving objects would tend to come to a stop if nothing interacted with them.

These were observations that Aristotle and his audience accepted as "obvious". It took more careful and patient observers to discern the less obvious truth.

[ci5er]

It's an iterative process. Anthro-centricism is powerful in terms of what it makes "obvious". The universe spins about the earth. That atoms are made up of objects. That we are the pinnacle of local evolution. That reality is really real.

[hyperbovine]

It's this vogueish thing among a certain set of programmers to go around saying they learned category theory. I studied category theory as a math graduate student and frankly, if your goal is simply to become a better programmer, there are much more direct and productive ways to achieve that goal.

[james_s_tayler]

I can certainly appreciate ways that there are more direct and productive ways to become a better programmer.

My goal is to become a better thinker in general. Specifically with regards to seeing how one type of thing relates to another type of thing.

I'm actually more interested in better understanding and reasoning about the ecology of software development than becoming a better programmer per se but only because on some level I think that's actually necessary in order to achieve the writing of better software.

To put that into English... we don't write software in a vacuum. We write it in a team, in a company, in a world full of other programmers and there is a rich set of relationships among all of those things that is exerting pressure on the final shape the software takes.

Category Theory seems like fun and useful tangent that might help me understand the world better and be mildly useful in an abstract way.

[rfergie]

Not qualified to speak on this myself, but I asked a similar question to a friend and he said something like:

Part of good software development is knowing where and when to create abstractions. Category theory has a collection of interesting and very general abstractions - if you can spot these patterns in your software development then they will be good candidates for abstraction/generalisation

[schwurb]

> I'm curious to know not only how it benefits an understanding of software development, programming languages and functional programming

It did and does that too (not much, since I am still a learner): It helps me to write APIs that behave well; usually, that means being an API which outward facing parts compose well. (The opposite would be an API where you configure it's internal state until it does what you want - the more complex the API, the harder it gets to mantain the suiting mental model). To be honest, it will help me getting the theoretic motivation behind many FP-concepts like monads, but I am not yet deep enough, I would not say I reaped a practical benefit in my haskell-writing. Reading (and implementing) "Category for programmers", which is a great blog, should take me there tho.

> but also has it helped you understand the world at large in new and novel ways?

On a local scale, it was fascinating to see how you get logic and algebras by putting a little bit of additional order onto some abstract concept. These formal logic rules I leard? Turns out they are not only funny ways to play with symbols, but also funny ways to play with arbitrary finite sets. It was also nice to see how in category theory, you can "fix" nice properties by creating a new structures where these nice properties are objects. It is all pretty handweavy, since I am mostly going by my intuition unless I am pressed to prove something formally. This thread might help you: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/16i322/whats_the_i.... Globally, I am a christian, so I see everything and everyone in relation to God anyways. Category Theory might at best helped me to identify God as the intitial and terminal object in the Category `Human` ;)

To give a short answer: I think CT is another tool in the box to gain a more connected view of the world, the main ingredients being age and observation of processes.

[leethargo]

Now imagine having a year of this kind of intensive study of category theory (or similar), that is, graduate-level classes in math.

[schwurb]

I envy those. I pity not having done my undergrad in maths! I have to say tho that we the examples learned in math department category theory are often not that important or interesting to programmers, and the same is true for the abstractions being studied.

[leethargo]

I did actually do graduate studies in math. Early on I went to Paris for 2 semesters where I tried to follow a course on category theory, in preparation to algebraic geometry. Even though I did lots of abstract algebra before that, the intensity was too much and I could not keep pace.

Interestingly, the Chinese students in that class did fairly well, even though they could not follow the actual lectures (given in French) and were studying exclusively from the lecture notes (given in English).

[marmot777]

Or the scholar/monk archetype.

[hodgesrm]

Stanford CS has at least a couple of people who seem to be really decent humans as well as great computer scientists. Besides Don Knuth, John Ousterhout is another person who comes to mind. Both of them have a humility combined with humor that I find quite admirable.

[black-tea]

Really? So everyone else in CS isn't even a "decent human being" by default for you?

[jnicholasp]

They were simply commenting that there were a couple people they especially admired, who they think are really decent (i.e., better than average at being decent). It is neither a necessary nor a natural reading to think that means they believe everyone else is below average.