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When you're looking for an expert in a field, do want to find someone that claims to know what they're doing because they read a book somewhere? Or do you want to find a seasoned pro that has actually tried and possibly failed using different techniques? Their failures may give them more insight and experience than their successes. Especially if they can tell you what they did to improve themselves afterwards.

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Becoming an expert has far more to do with knowing how to get things done in a known time frame than knowing every little piece of triva. One you code in the same language with 3 or 4 compilers you start to look at edge cases as a dangerous no mans land to be avoided if at all possible.

PS: I worked with code from the 1984 Macintosh days that was still in use in 2005. You could see where people had updated from Motorola 68020 to PPC and if it had not been stripped out some poor coder might have updated the remaining ASM to x86.

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