Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For every job I've ever had, I've been the "math and functional programming nerd", where I know lots of tricks in Haskell and F# and even concurrency theory within Java. I felt very smart.

I went to ICFP in 2019, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that I was the dumbest person there [1]. Everyone was speaking on four-syllable mathematical notation that I had never heard of, and talking about intricacies in GHC that I wasn't really familiar with, and different aspects of type theory that were completely foreign to me.

It was very humbling; it didn't depress me or anything, but made me realize that there's a lot to learn and improve on, and the people there were actually extremely nice and gave me some pointers so I can get incrementally closer to being as smart as they are.

I think 2024 Tom would be the second dumbest guy in the room if I went again.

[1] Knowledge-wise, I have no idea about IQ or anything.

Just imagine how much of a waste of time it would have been to attend a conference where everyone was pointing out mathematical concepts you had heard of, talking about intracacies in GHC you were familiar with, and discussing different aspects of type theory you thought were completely trivial!

No debate on that, I got a lot of Google fodder out of that conference, and ended up buying four or five textbooks as a result.

In a sense, this is how being in a foreign country where people talk in other languages and act within their own culture. They are more productive than you because the environment fits them more than it does you at that time.

And this acclimation is also similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_maturity, how you talk with math people the from math village and feel you are stupid because you're not familiar with the symbols, the vocabularies. But when you have learned the language, you will see that you become better and better at learning, you have the means to gain more means--forming some sort of a positive feedback loop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com