Is there such a thing as a "Programming Savant"?
-
Well, I believe I have worked alongside some programmers whose skills were so remarkable they would certainly qualify as a "savant," but, in general, these were also people with with pretty normal social-skills, a wide range of interests, as well. Were they (and I, at the time) "geeky" ? Maybe: a little; but, I think it was more from the passion for the work, and the feeling, particularly, at Adobe, that there was no choice but to be "excellent" at what you did (it was in the "culture," and it was not "fear-driven"). For a period of time people who exhibited extraordinary mental abilities in some narrow range were all classified as having "savant syndrome" and being "autistic:" but, that changed, as research showed that half of these people were not autistic. And, there are rare cases of suddenly acquired, in later life, savant-level remarkable abilities. I have known well one very unusual man who had phenomenal programming abilities as a "hacker;" I believe he fits the diagnosis of "high-functioning" Asperger's Syndrome, one of the three main divisions of the modern concept of ASD (Autistic Syndrome Disorders). He was a doctoral student in Physics at a major University, and evidently had a nervous break-down of some type, after which he never attended graduate school again, but I suspect that, for him, what, for most of us, is the "normal social world," and "social interaction," was always a very different experience in which he never "connected" with people. And, in the early days of the Berkeley (that's Berkeley, California) Macintosh User's Group, the famous phone-phreak, "Captain Crunch," John Draper, would often come, and then go hang-out with a group of us that would go out for dinner somewhere, after the meeting: his social awkwardness was very painful to watch, and he would often accidentally knock things off the table. These days, I'm happy to say, that all the old categories of "retardation," and "autism" are being challenged by new research on genetics, and brain development, and functioning. Dr. Temple Grandin's (autistic) incredible life and work [^] are a remarkable testimony to the possibility of achievements for persons with "autistic" disorder. I like to think there is a spectrum of types of intelligence, a continuum if you will, and at the "extremes" of this spectrum you can have generalized impairment of physical, mental, and social functioning that has a definitely genetic basis
BillWoodruff wrote:
he would often accidentally knock things off the table
Probably a third of the time I go out with friends, I spill beer on somebody, flip some silverware across the room, or dump some of my food/drink. I prefer to think of it more as entertainment than mishap. :)
-
BillWoodruff wrote:
he would often accidentally knock things off the table
Probably a third of the time I go out with friends, I spill beer on somebody, flip some silverware across the room, or dump some of my food/drink. I prefer to think of it more as entertainment than mishap. :)
I call it being drunk as a skunk
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
-
I call it being drunk as a skunk
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
I will admit that there is a correlation between the two (entertainment and skunkish drunkenness), but I will have to perform more studies before I can demonstrate a causal relationship.
-
I will admit that there is a correlation between the two (entertainment and skunkish drunkenness), but I will have to perform more studies before I can demonstrate a causal relationship.
I was once sufficiently drunk that I knocked a nearly full pint of beer off a bar, and simply bent and caught it before it hit the ground, hardly spilling a drop. This is a statistical anomaly that may spoil studies like yours, requiring the definition of 'spillage' to be more accurately defined. The fact that a sober person, on seeing the drink fall, would have stepped away, to avoid beery ankles, knowing, instinctively, the impossibility of catching the glass, before it hit the ground, would be, also, grounds for another, interesting, study. * * commas supplied in honour of Bill, may his punctuation never fail!
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
-
Hi Bill, you've taken this into a whole different line of thought, but I like the sound of it :) I hear you on the lack of shrinks back then. It sure is crazy to be normal these days. What do you make of the youth that have lost the ability as a society to attach to values of any healthy [debatable] ring of known people, perhaps due to the fact that they spend much of their time with virtual friends who they will probably never meet and in some cases do not exist, or exist in a very different way than what is presented over the waves of the mighty internet? I happen to know quite a number of individuals who consider themselves happy with the fact that they have managed to top the tidal times and lead a nice one-wife type of life. But then, if they are lucky\successful where is the world going? [and I'm talking on the short 10-30 years run, for the long run, I have no worries as I know the creator has well planned every aspect and the eventual outcome is clear to me]
Cheees, Edo
Edo Tzumer wrote:
It sure is crazy to be normal these days.
Hi, Edo, that's a great line ! :) I try and not "make anything" of "today's youth," particularly American younger persons, partly because I have not set foot in the US for over eleven years, by choice, and don't meet many except the children of expats in Thailand who are a rather select group. And, young Thais ... Thai culture ... what to make of an environment that has one head in the "modern world," and the other "head" in being the world's ultimate 24/7 party ... where everyone has a a mobile phone no matter how poor: what to make of young generation whose drug of choice is amphetamine (yaa baa) ? What to make of a society with juxtaposition of extreme inequalities of wealth and status worthy of pre-revolutionary France of Louis XIV, but saturated with every form of modern electronic media ? Of a society where skin-whitening lotions, aids, and treatments, are a multi-billion US $ dollar industry ? No more, no less, a paradoxical collage, I think, than current generations in the US, or Europe. And, on principle, I'd tend to extrapolate from my own experience, as someone (a baby-boomer) growing up in a segregated post-WWII middle-class white community in a southern state in the US, in a generation that were in general, remarkably uninformed about sex, naive, pre-teens in age when television first arrived on little black-and-white oval screens (which had rounded-corners !), living in a kind of "bubble-world" of American chauvinism ... and that little "bubble-world" was imploding and exploding only a few years later, after my high-school graduation in 1961, with de-segregation in the South, then the anti-Vietnam war movement, the full-fledged birth of a somewhat media-created circus of a counter-culture, and the various "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll," and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out" psychodramas of the later 1960's. I had run away from home in 1962, and was living in New York's lower East Side, trying to pretend I was a beatnik poet, delighting in living in a US $35 a month fifth-floor walk-up tiny apartment where the gas stove in the living room kept us warm as well providing cooking facilities, and a galvanized-lid folded down over the bath-tub, also in the living room, to make a nice dinner-table, experiencing the rapture of "living in sin," with my first true love, Beatrice (appropriate name for a poet's amour), whose father was a retired bird-colonel of the U.S. Air Force, and
-
BillWoodruff wrote:
he would often accidentally knock things off the table
Probably a third of the time I go out with friends, I spill beer on somebody, flip some silverware across the room, or dump some of my food/drink. I prefer to think of it more as entertainment than mishap. :)
Hi AspDotNetDev, I wonder if you have noticed that friends meeting you for drinks and/or food, lately, are showing up wearing raincoats, independent of the local weather conditions ? yrs, Bill
"Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, antisocial, mindless, and self-destructive, ways when they are immersed in 'total situations' that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality."
Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, in "The Lucifer Effect" 2008: ISBN-10: 08129744
-
*Cough ahem* programming savant. I thoroughly expected you to link to Sacha Barber's profile instead.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easierExactly who I thought of. DD is an alcohol savant, maybe.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Have you ever met or heard of a
Savant Programmer? I mean a real Savant. (See Savant_syndrome[^]) Further more, how come there is no cognitive theory that explains savants' combination of talent and deficit?Cheees, Edo
IBM used to believe it. A long time ago, IBM used to designate them Chief Programmer and would build a team around them. This is back in the old days (60's/70s) when IBM ruled. This was an early software methodology that was eventually abandoned because they just wasn't enough savants around. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChiefProgrammerTeam[^]
-
Have you ever met or heard of a
Savant Programmer? I mean a real Savant. (See Savant_syndrome[^]) Further more, how come there is no cognitive theory that explains savants' combination of talent and deficit?Cheees, Edo
I once worked with a guy (yo ~toma) who was a lightning calculator for programming. That is, he didn't have any obvious mental deficits, but he could write 5-10x as many lines of decent code per hour as the next best person on a pretty good team. The code he produced wasn't brilliant, but it was decent, effective code. So it happens.
-
Lopsided because every savant I have heard of has generally had a very underdeveloped emotional side(incapable of holding a conversation outside of their speciality, very few friends etc) - of course there are degrees to everything, however that is my anecdotal experience...
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
Have you ever personally met a "savant". I knew a guy at MIT who could solve the most complex Calculus in his head -- even to the point of taking seconds to prove the professors solution wrong (and requiring the professor hours to verify his solution). He was also an extremely gifted athlete, successful with the ladies, and the most insufferably arrogant SOB you ever met. I have to give him a pass on his arrogance because I think more than a few of us who knew him would have been almost as arrogant if we hadn't met him and realized we weren't all that special after all. I think the myth that people who are exceptionally brilliant in one area must be deficient in another is just that. A myth perpetuated by the rest of us so we can feel that we are still superior in some way.
-
Have you ever personally met a "savant". I knew a guy at MIT who could solve the most complex Calculus in his head -- even to the point of taking seconds to prove the professors solution wrong (and requiring the professor hours to verify his solution). He was also an extremely gifted athlete, successful with the ladies, and the most insufferably arrogant SOB you ever met. I have to give him a pass on his arrogance because I think more than a few of us who knew him would have been almost as arrogant if we hadn't met him and realized we weren't all that special after all. I think the myth that people who are exceptionally brilliant in one area must be deficient in another is just that. A myth perpetuated by the rest of us so we can feel that we are still superior in some way.
Yes I have met a couple of Savants and they don't meet the description of what you describe as a Savant. There is no DSM definition of Savant which I was not too surprised to find out as psychological conditions are notoriously difficult to define. My understanding of a Savant is someone who is very gifted but gifted in a very narrow field - for instance they can memorise every single chess move from a 1000 page book of chess moves, or draw a city landscape from memory with perfect proportionality - but that is where their gift ends.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
-
Yes I have met a couple of Savants and they don't meet the description of what you describe as a Savant. There is no DSM definition of Savant which I was not too surprised to find out as psychological conditions are notoriously difficult to define. My understanding of a Savant is someone who is very gifted but gifted in a very narrow field - for instance they can memorise every single chess move from a 1000 page book of chess moves, or draw a city landscape from memory with perfect proportionality - but that is where their gift ends.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
Yeah, it surprises me that the DSM even exists -- it just seems all too subjective to me with no real explanation of causes that I don't see how it's of any real diagnostic value at all... By your definition of savant, I guess I've never ever actually met one. Just read about them. And I always mistrust second or third hand reports -- you never know if the original observation was faulty, or if the re-telling was embellished for effect (or both). But I've met at least a dozen people who had truly spectacular skills with out any obvious deficiency in other areas. So, I'm convinced that it isn't necessary for someone to be deficient in other areas for them to have spectacular skills in specific areas. Although I imagine if you only have one skill, you are much more likely to spend all your time practicing that one thing...
-
Have you ever personally met a "savant". I knew a guy at MIT who could solve the most complex Calculus in his head -- even to the point of taking seconds to prove the professors solution wrong (and requiring the professor hours to verify his solution). He was also an extremely gifted athlete, successful with the ladies, and the most insufferably arrogant SOB you ever met. I have to give him a pass on his arrogance because I think more than a few of us who knew him would have been almost as arrogant if we hadn't met him and realized we weren't all that special after all. I think the myth that people who are exceptionally brilliant in one area must be deficient in another is just that. A myth perpetuated by the rest of us so we can feel that we are still superior in some way.
Good Will Hunting?