I have, on occasion, thought myself to be a better or equal computer scientist than some other particular person. This thought may be paradoxical in light of the forthcoming argument.
I was looking at this program someone wrote to make his
Linux desktop look more like his OS/2 desktop. Just then I thought,
"why bother, all you need is a good command-line interface and text
editor and you can do wonders." This made me think about how often
I take for granted my wonderful command-line interface(bash) and text
editor(vile). Then I took upon the most unenviable task of
imagining my life without either of these. This thought sent chills
up and down my spine. Then I realized that there are people out
there who do not use these marvelous tools, they use inferior ones
like tcsh and emacs. So, here is the problem:
If this person can accomplish the same task as I, yet in an inferior
environment, then wouldn't this person be better than I? Then I
took the example yet another step: what if the person used
micro$oft products? Surely there can be no worse environment,
none more restrictive, none more inferior. If this person can
complete the same task as I under such inhuman conditions, then
shouldn't they be much better then myself.
This thought was very distressing. I finally took heart in one idea: normally this type of person cannot complete the same task as I. And, if they could, it would take much more time. But, remember, there are exceptions to every rule.
The normal progression of events does not include this behavior. The great UNIX hackers¹ of old had a set of tools which were smaller and worse than the ones of today. There was a time when they were writing ed scripts to globally search for a regular expression and print it, now we use grep for that. They are obviously superior to myself since they can accomplish the same task with inferior tools. But, these people progressed, as new tools were added, like perl, they learned them and make use of them every day. So, these people don't need these tools, but they use them because they are easier and more fun.
Why do I describe this as paradoxical you ask? Because it is outside the normal progression of events. If someone is truly better and wiser than myself, then why would they exist in such a degraded environment. Hurting their own productivity and actually spending more money to do so. It makes me wonder if such a person could actually exist. Just the fact that, in theory, they could exist is perplexing, astonishing, and disturbing.
Copyleft: (C) 1997, William Totten