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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

jart makes me realize that my high school counselor Stella Sawicki was absolutely right when she said I wasn’t living up to my potential

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In your defense, Justine's been at this for a long time! Give it time and effort, and you too can do amazing technical things. Potential isn't a concrete thing, it's a set point you can move around.

Throw yourself at the computer, and the computer will do interesting things with you, too.

If it's not working, go at it from a different angle. Sometimes it's helpful to go back in time to come across things. I'd argue that 90% of cool tech phenomenon arises from studying the past to make something cooler in the future rather than any force of sheer will.

A lot of Justine's projects seem to fit this mold (if I remember right she came across the idea for Cosmopolitan after finding that a legacy UNIX feature let you avoid specifying your shell; SectorLISP, McCarthy's metacircular, etcetera).

She even cites someone whose entire deal is doing precisely that: Nils M. Holm.

Yes, Justine's amazing. I have also been following and reading Nils M. Holm's books. I program in J/APL, and I picked up Nils' book on Klong, but I have not fully worked through it yet. It gives me a perspective on J/APL. His Lisp stuff is great.

Nils his works are excellent; I always buy all that come out.

He's very prolific and the content is rich. I always feel I need to step up my game. People like Justine and Nils inspire me to keep at it!

Thank you all for your kind words! Now I almost want to write another book.

Please do!

Thinking about it, but writing a book is a large effort, I am not getting any younger and, to be honest, it is a bad idea from an economic point of view. My bestsellers, if you can call them that, sell about 30 copies per year.

I also wish to thank everyone here for the kind words. (Justine here btw.) Also Nils, awesome book! Glad I had the opportunity to cite it in the blog post.

> Sometimes it's helpful to go back in time to come across things.

Yeah, I remember her posting about the original Unix source code. I've never read it but I probably should. I bet there's plenty to be learned.

Sometimes I come across papers from the 70s and 80s too and they blow me away. It's amazing how much our predecessors achieved. Sometimes it feels like we're trying to rediscover or reinvent old technology.

If that were true then modern authors would just be guys trying to reinvent Shakespeare. As programmers, the programs we write can be art as much as it can serve a business utility. Some things progress but some things never change too, and each generation finds a way to express those things in a new and beautiful way. While learning to become a better programmer, I've found it helpful to read and be inspired by things like the UNIX source code, or texts written by guys like Vannevar Bush or John McCarthy, just as fiction authors might find inspiration reading the classics.

There's a lot of knowledge hidden in plain sight: it's accessible, and therefore known, and therefore people don't read through and learn it.

If it were hidden and secret, maybe people would take it more seriously.

How old are you? Is it too late for you to live up to your potential?

What made you reject the maybe a priori more likely alternative hypothesis that you just have less potential?

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