
The Path to Mastery (2000) - btilly
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=26380
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mathattack
I like an article about mastery that doesn't talk exclusively about 10,000
hours. The idea of nailing a subject's fundamentals is import. Similar to the
story, I did some of my best academic work in the subjects that I knew the
least about because I had to question everything.

I found the same thing to apply in UNIX. The folks who opened all the doors
and learned all the details (beyond what class asked) were the ones who could
later write 2 or 3 line scripts to solve most any problem.

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windsurfer
The discussion here is where the gold is.

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jqgatsby
interesting to see the tie in between good proofs and good programs. I've
never done much with perl, but I've heard that one can achieve a very high
degree of concision.

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btilly
I would say that Perl is roughly on par with other scripting language in terms
of how concise it is. The downside is that it is more idiosyncratic, the
upside is that it has better libraries. Perl has been good to me, personally,
but I'm not about to try to tell a Ruby or Python developer that they have an
overwhelming need to switch.

However the advice about knowing your tools applies to proofs, programming,
cooking, mechanical engineering...

