

The importance of doing it wrong - blhack
http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/

======
wccrawford
I have never yet read advice that suggested doing things the wrong way and
felt the person was actually better for it.

Did he have a good experience and a tale to tell in the end? Sure, but he has
to temper it with how stupid he was being the whole time. You can have awesome
experiences without failing! Without being stupid! Without endangering
yourself on purpose!

Likewise, with code, it's the same way. How much better it would be to look
back on your code and think, 'Man, that's still awesome!'? And let's not
forget the people who come after you. Would you rather have them tell you how
awesome you code is, or treat you with disdain for the pile of crap you
dropped in their lap? And I know what kind of code your employer prefers.

~~~
nhaehnle
I think his point is not so much that you _should_ do things the wrong way.
It's more that you should stretch yourself and go to your limits. You will
inevitably do things the wrong way from time to time when you test your
limits, but you will also learn much more than if you just stayed in your
comfort zone.

So doing things the wrong way is a symptom of testing your limits, which is a
good thing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes, you do things the
wrong way out of plain stupidity, so the implication doesn't go both ways.

~~~
shimsham
yes, it's all about learning

------
shimsham
pertinent and coherent article. I agree with it all, from experience.
excellent and none of the usual homesy motivational nonsense.

~~~
blhack
Thanks, Shimsham :)

Unfortunately, I think it might have spent a little bit too much time on the
bicycling part of the story...

I'm considering rewriting it and submitting it again tomorrow...I think it's
an important thing to remember (that screwing up and doing it wrong is how you
learn) :)

~~~
shimsham
I think the analogy is tenuous but nevertheless valid. i saw where the article
was going from the start. and of course, it's not about forcibly doing the
wrong thing but the point at which u realise and what you then do. hopefully
this is only done once.

when some friends, relatively new to unix, asked me various questions, I asked
them what would happen if they did:

cd /; rm -fr /

I then suggested that, just to make sure they understood the consequences,
they do this on basic Linux virtual machine so they could break the machine as
much as they needed. illustrative, useful and they never felt they needed to
do it again. bruises and cuts have their place :)

~~~
blhack
You know, one of the things that really made me feel like I knew what I was
doing with linux was when I accidnetally typed the following (as root [being
root was a stupid, stupid thing to be, I learned my lesson]).

gibson:/# mv * .jpg /var/www/html/images/

ooooops.

I moved my entire directory structure into /var/www/html/images/

No /bin, no /lib, nothing.

Calling things with an absolute path, a la /var/www/html/imagse/bin/ls

gave me:

/lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

Eventually, I figured out that calling:

/var/www/html/lib/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /var/www/html/lib
/var/www/html/bin/ln -s /var/www/html/lib /lib

Would let me rebuild the system by mving things back to their proper location.

After that, any problems I encountered seemed trivial.

~~~
shimsham
;-) nice. this is how people learn to wear the careful gloves if they have to
do things as root, or when sudoing.

