as to that 1%, one must be careful when saying such words not to be too convincing! :)))

Thank God there are dreamers (far less than 1% of us, and that is quite bad!) who do not listen to such words and write their OS, language or design a new paradigm… thanks to them, we have blogs to write to, languages to play with and this curry stuff that some people love and others do not really get ;)

All the programmers, I’ve known have lobbied either me or other supervisors for a technical writer. Why? Documentation is hard. It’s tedious and if you leave it for last, it’s anti-climatic.

Creating clear, concise, usable documentation is a part of programming. That is truly the hardest thing in programming.

The hardest and best part about CS is studying what people have done, finding the limitations and potentials- minima and maximas- and distilling out the best and most practical essences of each idea, then smashing them together in high energy late night experiments. Yes it involves your chief suggestion of long long hours reading citeseer and source code; the difference is that you take fistfuls of the old and attempt to build something radically new and better.

Of course in 97% of cases you are right, but I’ll take that 3% of hard sweat and highly kinetic work any day.

All my fanciness is placed on top of other programs. Most of the time is seems that the web needs a good CMS that also has Unique Application X. Well, X may or may not be written. That is where the money is…

–Nahtass