Thanks, 25 years in and I'm still learning new things. But I don't think I was specifically shouting out the Unix philosophy. My comment was more in response to the OP article, that rather than "trying" to optimize in the sense that you already know what you need to optimize for and towards, instead thinking of self-improvement as being a by-product of being able to think new thoughts, thus the upfront emphasis on the acquisition of new language (with a big nod to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). This could be through collecting good terminology, best practise and patterns, and learning the philosophies of systems such as Unix and languages like Go and Python. However, with aliases and scripts, it becomes something you can actually "speak" in an effective sense, which ultimately can lead to improvements over earlier capabilities that go beyond what you could have envisioned as possible from the start.
I took a handful of math courses in school, and what I didn't realize till later was that learning how to rigourously prove things mathematically had dramatically reshaped my mind. I am left wondering what it must be like for the minds of those who have traversed that tower far higher than I ever have or will.
I took a handful of math courses in school, and what I didn't realize till later was that learning how to rigourously prove things mathematically had dramatically reshaped my mind. I am left wondering what it must be like for the minds of those who have traversed that tower far higher than I ever have or will.