No one can be Larry Wall overnight

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Re: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 13, 2001 at 17:45 UTC
If you are like me, you are frustrated that you are not Damian Conway, writing great books, authoring highly-used and highly useful modules, and traveling the world teaching here and there and so forth. Oddly enough, I've never had a goal to be "The Damian". Perhaps I am not like you. I'm happy just to be helping people at the skill level I'm at, and to get a paycheck here and there for helping enough other people in a concentrated area. There are many things that Damian knows that I don't, and vice versa. There are many places that Damian's been (and taught at) that I haven't, and vice versa. What's the point of comparison. I've been programming for 30 years now (gack, am I really that old? {grin}), and I still learn something new nearly every day. Not just trivial things either. Probably the most important response I can give you is that you should understand your limitations, embrace them, and not work outside them. That's not to say your limitations tomorrow will be the same as today, but you should always be aware of what you don't yet know. It's perfectly fine not to know something, even though some of us think we need to know it all on day one. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by footpad (Abbot) on Apr 13, 2001 at 17:51 UTC
"Do you know how to get to be Larry Wall?" "Yeah...Practice." Remember, success is the journey...not the destination. (Good article, though. Thanks.) --f	[reply]
Re (tilly) 1: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by tilly (Archbishop) on Apr 14, 2001 at 18:47 UTC
The analogy may go farther than was meant. A tidbit from a conversation a few years ago with someone who entered bike races. Apparently bikers prefer to slip into a lower gear and pedal faster than to go into a higher gear. Now I don't know why bikers do that, but from a little physics one reason that comes to mind is that you should get better acceleration. That strikes me as representative...	[reply]
Re: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by TStanley (Canon) on Apr 13, 2001 at 22:59 UTC
Thank you for the link. That was a very interesting and well written article. TStanley In the end, there can be only one!	[reply]
Re: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by Fingo (Monk) on Apr 13, 2001 at 20:05 UTC
Well Linus Torvaltz(sp?) tried to write a kernel, and he succesed OVERNIGHT. The point is that he tried to write a peice of software, not be a famous programer. He succeded at both. UPDATE:I meant that he became a pop-culture icon (admit it, out of the open-source community, he is probably the most famous to the rest of the world) He became this because he started work on linux, and got many others to help. Linux became a success almost overnight and so did Linus. My point is that one's immidiate goals should not be to become famous, but to create good things. With the second comes the first. Oh and I have actualy read a bit. Linux became popular with the hacker culture in the mather of one or two years. If you look at the original mesages to comp.os.minix, Linux was growing extremly rapidly in the early days.	[reply]
Re: Re: No one can be Larry Wall overnight by PsychoSpunk (Hermit) on Apr 13, 2001 at 20:58 UTC
Ahem, are you running Linux v0.01? Linus meagerly announced a little project that he was working on. It took many others to bring it the success it has had. I cannot recall Linus being a pop culture icon nor can I recall the "halcyon" days of even v1.x kernels. I doubt that any significant portion of the monks here can either. I suggest reading the Credits for the latest kernel. Maybe search the archives of ftp.kernel.org and see the credits for v1.0. Then you'll understand that Linux didn't happen overnight. I definitely wouldn't run a kernel that wasn't written in a night of binge coding. Honestly, would you? ALL HAIL BRAK!!!	[reply]