Subject: Re: Static/Strong/Implicit Typing From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 26 Jan 2004 22:26:36 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3284144796180060KL2065E@naggum.no> * Pascal Costanza | Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the | world is stupid? Because they are autodidacts. The main purpose of higher education and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than they are smart at. If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else. Educate him properly and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he will gain a profound respect for other people. Many programmers act like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations. To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of control is actually a very good reason to panic. -- Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway 2004-026 Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.