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Eric S. Raymond - The Curse of the Gifted (2000)

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Re: Eric S. Raymond - The Curse of the Gifted (2000)

#61

Anybody have good advice for a first year university student who slept through most of high-school, got good grades, and then failed his first calculus exam because he was reading "Practical common lisp", instead of studying? How do i learn to study if i find the subject boring? How do i get disciplined? I know a lot of you have been here, how did you handle it?

I basically didn't, and ended up going to school for an extra year and a half from all the failed classes, which added quite a bit onto the student loan total. In the end, the degree doesn't even matter, because I'm doing startup stuff.

A warning, more than advice.

Re: Eric S. Raymond - The Curse of the Gifted (2000)

#62
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. He'll run across a problem that doesn't just fall down and surrender in the face of his blinding intellect, and at that point, his studying and thinking skills (not the math trivia) will kick in and allow him to slay the beast.

A trivial tangent: oddly enough I find that, whether I'm programming for distributed applications or animations, it is the number theory, and not (surprisingly) the linear algebra, that I am most grateful for having learned. Boutade's Law: do not underestimate the algorithmic utility of knowing your way around the integers.

This is intriguing. Care to elaborate on a problem you've had and how number theory helped? I did the typical math courses required for a computer science degree (discrete math, linear algebra, diffeq, probability and statistics), but stopped short of the serious math courses (analysis). I've been meaning to start up with analysis (mainly for fun) but I'm intrigued to see how it might help in my day to day work.

Re: Eric S. Raymond - The Curse of the Gifted (2000)

#63
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A trivial tangent: oddly enough I find that, whether I'm programming for distributed applications or animations, it is the number theory, and not (surprisingly) the linear algebra, that I am most grateful for having learned. Boutade's Law: do not underestimate the algorithmic utility of knowing your way around the integers.

This is intriguing. Care to elaborate on a problem you've had and how number theory helped? I did the typical math courses required for a computer science degree (discrete math, linear algebra, diffeq, probability and statistics), but stopped short of the serious math courses (analysis). I've been meaning to start up with analysis (mainly for fun) but I'm intrigued to see how it might help in my day to day work.

Well, unless you're terribly interested in moving on to things like differential geometry, I'd put analysis off a bit longer were I you. If you'd like something stimulating and potentially useful, more advanced combinatorics, number theory, or algebraic geometry might all be good choices. The first two tend to overlap a bit when they are presented in textbooks (with some group theory tossed in as well). If you do crazy graphics programming, or if you program robots' spatial reasoning, algebraic geometry might pay off - though, AG doesn't have as easy an entry. (One exception might be via the book Computational Algebraic Geometry by Hal Schenck).

As far as number theory "paying off": 1) Many proofs in number theory are algorithmic in nature; 2) Computers understand integers with greater facility than they do the psuedo-reals we call floats - often times efficient integer approximations will be more appropriate than slower floating point solutions, and knowing the integers will help you develop/understand these approximations; 3) If cryptography is your bag, number theory is a must; 4) Martin Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich, Julia Robinson, Hilbert's 10th problem, Turing Machines, computability theory, and (the number theory bit) diophantine equations (sorry to be cryptic, this is getting rather long winded).

Re: Eric S. Raymond - The Curse of the Gifted (2000)

#64
post #38

"Your tendency to undervalue modularization and code-sharing is one symptom [of the curse]. Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or release-engineering practices. To you, these things seem mostly like overhead and a way of needlessly complicating your life." I'd say he came around on version control with git - five+ years later.

At the time I think CVS was the proposed system. Linus said he preferred patches. I'm not sure he was wrong. AFAIK, bitkeeper was designed (not sure to what extent) when Larry got together with Linus and Linus explained how he wanted it to work.

I've heard it told the other way around. That Larry had worked on Teamware at Sun and he showed Linus how distributed SCM worked. Linus said "if you build that, I will use it" and Larry built it.
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