This proves it to me: what everyone calls rocket science is really just trial and error. Wait... Does this mean we're all rocket scientists?!

That looked Norwegian to me. (in my defense, I'm Swedish...)

When it comes to breaking builds, our culture is that the one who broke it is quick to at least say they investigate it, lest their inbox fills up with "friendly reminders" from all the others. As for bugs: We tend to use "You were the last to touch it!", the the age-old unwritten rule that has governed many a playground over the millennia. I'm not necessarily for shaming someone who trips and falls (as others have said, we all do from time to time), but if that someone then refuses to fix their mess, or tries to get away from fixing it, that's a whole different ballgame.

I'd like to think that there has indeed been a major shift, if not revolutionary then teetering on the border, that has to do with the handling of information. Over the years, humans have been better and better at two things regarding information: *) Persisting it *) Proliferating it I think that we have reached the penultimate step in that evolution, where we no longer need to physically carry all information stored in our brains or in books in our backpacks, but can utilize the channeling of information from WWW to a small client device that fits in our pocket. All that is left there is lowering the threshold between that client and ourselves, which I believe will happen with the mainstream adoption of wearable tech. The point to all this, though, is not the technology per se, but rather the shift in our relationship with the information we handle. There are certain limitations put on information purely for the purposes of storing and finding it. These limitations have gone from mnemonic encapsulation (for easy remembering), to sequential ordering (for easy expression in writing), to multi-media information containers that can be essentially tailored to the information and its use, rather than the other way around. Also, the ease of accessing the information required for any situation means that the correlation between the amount of information and the effort to bring it along has all but evaporated; we have less and less need to put in the physical effort to memorize and/or carry the information with us. This all means that the required amount of "cache" in a normal human being is much less than it used to be. And in a society as reliant on competence as ours, this means that the ability to store and access vast amounts of information no longer is the societal marker of excellence that it once was. Quite the contrary, anyone making the effort to memorize information that is readily available through a smart phone will likely be seen as curious, if not stupid. We have, in essence, gone from a society where the power lay in the ability to keep information, to a society where the power lies in the ability to acquire it when needed here and now. To put it another way: It's just silly to memorize stuff when you have Google.

I had three really really major ones in University; The first real moment for me was grasping the concept of recursion, the second was the concept of object orientation, the third was dynamic/iterative programming. I'm still waiting for the one on the topic of functional programming... On a side note, I had minor "A-Ha!" moments about once a minute during the CS lab assignments - although they were more of the "Oh, so that's why it won't work! :doh: " variety. Also, I didn't use the term specified, instead opting for the slightly more sarcastic "Bingo!" everytime I detected a flaw in my algorithms. It came to the point where my lab partner would beat me to it: I slammed the palm into the table and he'd shout "Bingo!" just ahead of me. It felt good to know that I had an influence on his education... :)

In C++, it's explicit. a bool variable can be zero or non-zero, making the check at least desirable. In VB, or C#, or Java, it's unnecessary most of the time, since a bool can only have two values - and defaults to false instead of null.

In my experience, the biggest difference (and, as I see it, the crucial one) is that the "budding" female coders I have met (that is, the ones starting out - don't you dare misinterpret, guys...) are much less prone to take chances and test stuff - they have an annoying (to me, anyway) tendency to throw their hands up in the air and say "I don't know how to do this!", to which I invariably respond "Neither did I - but I learned". Male coders, including the n00bs, seem to be more willing to "wing it", that is: They will try and (mostly) fail a couple of times but they will eventually learn - and at the same time they will find confidence in the fact that they CAN LEARN STUFF ALONG THE WAY, rather than finding confidence in that they KNOW STUFF ALREADY. I won't get into any discussion on how or why this is, or even if this is a common occurrence - I have only limited experience on the subject. It might as well be that my pond is too small, and all the other ducks are too much alike. A question for the masses, though, is: If I encounter a coworker (any profession, color, shape, form or persuasion) that seems to lack the confidence that he or she CAN LEARN STUFF ALONG THE WAY, how should I counter this? When I get the reaction "I don't know this!" what should I respond? How can I relate the fact that (most) failures are OK, as long as you learn enough from them not to repeat them?

As others have stated, you sadly stumbled on (over?) a singularity point. Shame though, many of us would attest to having empirical evidence supporting your theory: 3 hours = (1/infinity) => infinity = 1/3 hours = 20 minutes - mind you in the (in)appropriate context.

modified on Sunday, January 3, 2010 9:59 AM