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Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

David Nolen - http://swannodette.github.io/

I follow these guys for similar reasons. They always seem to be a couple steps ahead of the rest of the industry and it's frankly a little embarrassing how productive they are. Come to think of it maybe I'd feel better about myself as a programmer if I stopped following them...

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I mean this in the most respectful way possible: David Nolen has a reached a level of enlightment the French describe as jouissance I will never achieve.

What makes you say that?

just the way he talks and simplifies FP in a way that previously has been impossible to achieve.

Agreed on David Nolen, although I regularly feel he doesn't know how much smarter than the average developer he is, and I find a lot of his work inscrutable from both the documentation and API standpoint.

That impression goes away quickly when you meet him since he is a tremendously empathic person and clear speaker. The difference, in my opinion, is that he expects another level of effort/investment from the consumers of his work than other open source contributors.

That mismatch often causes frustration from people that are not used to it. In my case, it quickly went away once I understood the implicit contract.

I recently had the chance to see David Nolen speak at CUSEC, it was an amazing experience. I think back to it a lot.

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