Moserware: What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer?
Excellent article on the some of the thought-processes that development requires. I know I personally have trouble kicking the ball a little farther when it comes to development, and one of my challenges is to keep pushing myself to learn more and more each day. Lately I’ve lost the taste for coding, but this article has at least for the moment given me a bit of that hunger back.
If it really does take 10 years to become a grandmaster (it’s not that simple), then learning C# seems like a waste. After all, Micro$oft was sole provider for VB, and killed it.
I want a language that is *really* stable, warts and all. K&R C (1980) translates to ISO C (1987) and even to ISO C (1999). No drastically new concepts. All the old stuff works. Well, maybe i haven’t recovered from glibc2 yet. But the language still works.
Not true for C++. Some projects were rewritten from C++ to C for portability reasons, for example. Java also suffers from this.
I don’t believe that just anyone, working hard, goes from zero to grandmaster in ten years, even with a mentor. Some will not get there in twenty.
There are short cuts. For example, the Japanese abacus can be used as a tool to get grade school kids to amazing math talent, far more efficiently than typical methods. A good mentor *might* know some of these.