Robert Morris: All About Programming

Don't understand this part, what's the obvious thing about math he was late in admitting? Were the Bell labs people right in his opinion or not?

That resonates deeply with me. Until my early 20s, I was terrible at absorbing any form of wisdom from anyone. I just went ahead forward into whatever interested me, with no regard for what anyone would have to say about it. I was fortunate enough to be born with a brain that worked fairly well and allowed me to get away with this behavior for the longest time.

It is for this reason that I consider my time in grad school as mostly a failure - I joined at 19 as a PhD student and left 2 years later with a Master's degree, leaving the PhD for startups, and in those 2 years I didn't achieve anything that I'd consider interesting work (completely by my own fault). Even worse, my immaturity resulted in me making very little of the absolutely brilliant advisor I had (the perfect combo: a researcher whose early work pioneered a new field and gave him enormous peer recognition, but who was still early enough in his career that he had plenty of time to devote to his students), who had high hopes for me that ended up completely unfulfilled.

It was only after a few years of working in the real world with some very smart (and some very dumb) people, getting yelled at, seeing friends get fired (I never got fired myself although I came close a few times), and a few other similar experiences that I realized that indeed my life would be much improved if I stopped and recognized that some people do have words of wisdom that hold value for me. Psychedelics and traveling the world+meeting people who had it way worse than me yet achieved way more with what they had also contributed significantly to my maturing - the rewards of it being that I now am starting to enjoy an amount of success, clarity, and reward in my work that would have been unconceivable 6 years ago (although it still feels like most of the road is ahead, as it should).

For those reasons, it feels like advice such as the one given by PG is lost: the people who need it most won't really get the importance of what he means, and the people who will get it can do so because they've already internalized it.

All that being said, I look forward to 5 years from now, when I will say things about my mid-20s similar to what I just said about my early 20s :)

I intuitively knew as a child that there were parts of programming and using computers which "weren't work" for me, but also very much ones that were, and I foresaw the probability that I might cease to enjoy the "not work" parts after being ground down by too much work.

As I come back to it now, I still think that. Increasingly I think it really, genuinely, depends on the style and language of programming you take up, and what you do with it. When I code in something like Lisp or Haskell, it doesn't feel like "work," it feels like problem solving. I tend to focus on CS topics as well; I built a VM, and a couple of programming languages, because they too were fun to think about, not work.

For me, I have progressively gravitated to more and more expressive languages, while moving away from more imperative ones which descend into repetitive "design patterns". I burned out quickly on the world of web programming, which inherently seems to require a whole lot of tedious yak shaving if you're flying solo.

Of course, the flipside which anyone bothering to read this may already be hastening to chastise me with is that none of this is likely to necessarily lead to actual employment.

Someone has to do the "work." And the amount of "work" to be done is a lot greater than there are people who don't find it work, which is why there will always be a lot more demand for that. In part I suspect this is because some kinds of "work" are self-replicating (Java programming begets the need for more Java programmers ...), but I nonetheless find myself fearing that my chosen "not work" is merely a fool's fantasy; and I occasionally have guilt complexes about "why am I not just learning JavaScript so I can at least get a gruntwork job at Rovio or somewhere" ...