Review HN: my first essay "Thoughts on learning and programming for Hackers"

OK, it's not clear how detailed you want a critique to be, so I'll throw out a few thoughts that I hope you find useful, interesting or provocative.

Firstly, let me say that I'm always humbled by someone who writes clearly in a language other than a cradle language. Having said that there are many, many small grammatical errors. Even so, the writing is pretty clear, and most of the errors do not obscure the meaning. That's impressive.

You say:

    A similar approach, learning only when required, is
    good for hackers.  According to me, learning what's
    necessary when a situation calls for it triumphs over
    that of learning just because something exists or is
    available. ... I advocate learning as a process that
    is supposed to run in parallel with implementation.
    You learn by doing it and you learn only because you
    require it.

I think this is thoroughly, fundamentally wrong. Dangerously wrong. I think you should have a voracious appetite for knowledge and information that currently lies just out of reach, even if it serves no useful purpose. Time and time again I've found that things I learned simply because they were interesting have turned out to be crucial in understanding something critical later on.

You can never know in advance what you will need, and chance favors the prepared mind. The legendary golfer Gary Player said "The more I practise the luckier I get."

Learn stuff beyond what you think you need.

Several times you say "Most engineers ..." and then say something that is, in my mind, completely at odds with the majority of engineers I know. It started to annoy me, and made me start to doubt other things you were saying. Specifically, for example, I don't know any good engineers who think "writing good code means saving every possible byte of memory and computational power." You seem simply to be setting up straw men to be knocked down, and that's not a convincing style. Your points should stand on their own.

There are several other points with which I disagree, but they're your opinions, and I won't argue them here.

There are grammatical errors such as this:

    "They might be simple like a software that solves ..."

The "a" is unnecessary (and incorrect).

There are many other places where you have unnecessary words and the writing could be tightened significantly.

And it feels like it rambles. It's not really clear what your main point is, or how you're getting there. You have a lot of opinions that you state, and clearly feel are self-evident, but there's not much of a logical progression.

But finally, and this is my main point, I read it to the end and was interested. If this is your first essay, it will be interesting to see your fiftieth.

Or even your tenth.