| I believe that Zed was striving for Zen in his post. As a college student and someone who read LPTHW, I'm quite happy to see this entry. I have seen the negative attitudes of many self-ascribed "programmers" in the CS department at my University. I feel like a lot of this comes from the point that Zed was making - the old dogs are upset because new people are circumventing how they learned to code. It's strange that some people hold so dearly to their old methods of learning, but I do feel like one must let go of that way of thinking if they wish to be happy. The new methods of learning are great and they usually don't cement anyone into thinking they're a "programmer." One of my best friends goes to RISD and he learned to code from LPTHW and he is one of the best coders I know (although I think his style is weird sometimes... but that's beside the point). What matters is he is making cool things and he is humble about it. People shouldn't be too attached to any one thing on this earth, it takes away from our complexity as humans. We have such boundless potential and I hate to see that get knocked down by people who are afraid of losing their identity as a "programmer." Those people are so much more than that too! Even if they read all of Knuth's literature and have built compilers, humans aren't robots, why should we act like them? We must let go of the identities that cause to inflict harm on people. Zed has come across as rather harsh in some of his writing, but this post is very beautiful. I'm not saying that Jeff is a bad guy, I'm just glad that Zed wrote this post. Hopefully in time we can all let go of the identity of being a programmer. Most of us use libraries built by other people that are so abstracted anybody could do it! And what's cool about the people who are building the gnarly libraries is they put it out for opensource - they want people to use it 8^) Don't be concerned with the bullies, go out there and have fun! |