True enough.
Its very easy to find yourself trapped by a false dilemma. You can believe in yourself, in which case you have to believe your judgment is always correct, or you don't, in which case everything is pointless. The middle ground, that you believe you can always learn what's necessary, but you might not know it now, and you might need to go through many intermediate steps to get to where you want to go, is an incredibly frightening proposition in many complex ways. Even people who acknowledge this fact on an intellectual level can fall prey to its grasp in ways they cannot find a way to escape from. Its just sometimes more obvious than others.
The truth is that most people believe if they understand the words, they understand the concepts. That you can get from A to Z directly, if only you learn the language of Z. And the sad fact is many people go from cradle to grave believing this fallacy. This is why most home improvement projects go awry, why everyone thinks they understand the law even though law school is one of the harder academic institutions, why players who were computer science majors were the worst City of Heroes players when it came to figuring out how the game worked. Computer science students knew the language of software - not programming syntax, but the
language programmers use to talk to each other about software - so they automatically thought they knew how all software was written, including MMOs. I have so many computer science students' heads on my wall they block out the windows. But they were so (cock-)sure, so insistent, so unwilling to concede that everything they knew was wrong. The notion that everything they were spoon-fed might be completely worthless to attacking this problem? Too scary to admit, ever. They could have tried to learn, but that would require admitting what they couldn't admit. So they went down fighting instead. And walked away from an opportunity to learn something new.
There are people watching us chat about card decks and LISP machines, and believe the conversation is the thing. What they don't know, and can't know, is that 90% of this conversation is happening outside of the words. Its happening in the things our words are evoking, like when I give FFM PTSD flashbacks about writing Clipper code. I know what that was like, he apparently knows what that was like, we're sharing a war story in which all of the casualties are unmentioned. The words are not the thing. The words are shorthand for the thing.
This is something else I often talked about on the forums, that because the words are not the thing, when the words don't evoke the right thing, alarm bells go off. Take Codewalker's insane bot proposal:
My bot is a Haskell program than generates Modula-3 code, which is JIT compiled by a Lisp program and executed on a Z-80 emulator, which is implemented as a redstone machine in Minecraft.
That's not just random computer languages strung together. All of that properly evokes the right things to me, and probably to most experienced veteran programmers. Haskell is a functional language that is both tricky to learn, and has a history of doing very powerful things in specific problem spaces, like code generation. Its logical that a Haskell program would be generating Modula-3 code, but a sign of someone spewing randomness if it was the other way around (besides: who else writes Modula-3 besides bots?). Of course LISP is going to compile Modula-3, and not the other way around. This is a joke that works on two levels, the informal one (this is ridiculous, look at all the unnecessary layers) and also some inside ball (its ludicrous, and yet I can imagine someone doing that just to melt people's brains). But that second level only works if you are an
experienced programmer or computer engineer, no amount of knowing the language and navigating wikipedia is going to communicate the joke. And without that experience, you can't easily construct the joke either. If he had said this instead:
My bot is a LISP program running in a redstone machine in Minecraft, which is written in Modula-3 and running on a Z-80 emulator implemented in HaskellI would have wondered if someone hacked his PC or he was powering his push to release Paragon Chat with tequila. There's nothing technically
wrong about that version of the joke, and yet there's everything wrong. On the informal level, its the same joke. On the deeper level, its a cry for help.
Again: there's nothing wrong if you can't see the difference between those two jokes. There's nothing wrong with not knowing everything everyone else knows. The problem comes when you claim to know, but don't actually know. Because those two jokes are why its impossible to pretend for long. Soon enough, everyone will know. Little things which are actually big things will give the game away. You won't know what they are, you'll strongly deny what they mean, but everyone will know.
And what's the point of pretending, when you could be learning instead?
Besides which, if I was Codewalker, I would have gone all the way with that bot:
My bot is a Haskell program than generates Modula-3 code, which is JIT compiled by a Lisp program into Redcode and executed on a MARS vm running in a Z-80 emulator, which is implemented as a redstone machine in Minecraft.Damn skippy.
