Why go to college ?

When you can invent your own course ?

Stiff seems to have created (crafted) his own course, and it makes for very interesting reading. I seem to have opened 15 links in new tabs before I got from his blog to mine (not counting the links which went to Amazon, can't afford that these days).

Given the quality of the links Stiff comes across as erudite and experienced, so it was a surprise to see his real age. But his age may also be garnered by the comment that Swing is "the best GUI toolkit programming-wise I’ve ever saw ... its a pity its sucks user-wise".

Two dead giveaways for youth in a programmer:

1. A program is "for" the programmer
2. "My code has no bugs"

Actually the latter is my one consistent interview question. I only started coding in my 30s, and the last guy I gave a job to seems to have started in kindergarten, so I'm always aware that age is not a good measure of experience. A much better measure is "What percentage of the new code you write has bugs ?"

An experienced humble programmer should reply "100"

An experienced arrogant programmer may reply with somewhere above "80". (And any programmer who manages to retain arrogance about his chosen profession doesn't have exnough experience yet :-)

A junior will use numbers less than "50".

Why AI ?

AI is agitatingly interesting.

I just can't get it out of my head, it has such arresting implications, and actual implementations. But still has room for mailing lists full of tomes that start with "I believe ...".

Of course there is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence", because there is no agreed definition of intelligence. Hence poor ol' Deep Blue takes on the champeen o de worl', beats him, and ... is not "intelligent" after all. And many algorithms will suffer the same applied ignominy as it turns out their solutions aren't "intelligent" after all. Like Jane in Michael Jackson's story.

All of which shall continue in the great world out there, but in here I am going to apply insights derived from the field to the more awkwardly immediate problem of PI - programming intelligence.

Why should PI be a more immediate problem than AI ? Because I need it daily, and the tools I have to work with are so fucking primitive. With one or two honourable exceptions, the tools I use for programming, are nothing to do with programming !

Ok, ok, caveats galore again - I do use compilers, and build systems, and debuggers, but for two out of these three I don't use them directly, they happen behind the curtain. And, now that I think of it - I haven't used a debugger in months. Not since I switched to Python.

So I can reasonably repeat - the tools I use for programming know nothing about programming.