>Bob: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students?
>Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.
This is a problem I don't understand too. If you are really into something you motivating yourself in doing things. You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
I don’t think stackoverflow is a problem at all, I think it’s much better to have people ask stupid questions than to call them stupid.
That being said, I do think people owe it to themselves to read the documentation first. I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option. There are a few exceptions of course, when the official documentation flat out sucks.
I do think we have a general issue with how we teach CS though. Especially outside the hardcore CS degree, because we’re really not teaching young people computation anymore, we’re teaching them how to produce results. This is especially true for places like Udemy and YouTube, but it’s frankly also true on more UX centric or academy/bachelor level degrees.
I do external examinations on academy levels, and earlier this year I went to a place where they teach associate degrees in CS. Only they opted to build their places as a “gaming education”, so they had a heavy emphasis on Unity. And sure enough, the students were pretty good at unity, but only a handful of them knew how to calculate Big O of a few simple examples and only a single student knew how a computer actually works.
When I did my own freshman year, one of my first tests was to decode a hidden message by altering the contents of a bitmap file using C. That’s pretty useless, sure, but it teaches you a lot of things, including how to read the official documentation for a bitmap, which is a much more useful skill than knowing how to use a certain version of some framework. At least in my opinion.
And you know what? It took me straight to my own Stack Overflow answer where I explained how to do this, either preserving or removing any trailing zeroes.
Who needs to remember things when you have a service like that? ;-)
Ever been a novice at something hard but still wanted to do it?
Like really, if you were to try to learn Korean (assuming you don't know it) right now, you think you'd have any simple questions that someone who'd been speaking Korean all their life would find absurdly easy?
Everyone starts from somewhere, this sort of ego-ist stuff is toxic. It is okay to be bad at things and it is okay to ask dumb questions.
I get where you are coming from here, but calling someone stupid for looking to get past a sticking point isnt stupid. spinning your wheels when an answer exists is stupid. I think stack overflow proves that there is most likely no problem you are solving that hasnt been solved before, and given the pace of change of things, nobody can know everything. Heck I still google SQL 101 questions on occasion and I write sql/C#/C++ daily. I can either rack my brain and beat myself up for not remembering some syntax, or go look up the answer...
>You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today.
Wow, why the aggressiveness? This strikes me as prime "/r/iamverysmart" material. Yes, we get it, you figured everything out for yourself, well done -.- Yet if something is not trivially apparent to somebody (as everything seems to be to you) why should they not ask questions in a website whose purpose is to ask questions. I find it's almost always better to just ask for help when you are stuck rather than bang your head on a brick wall for hours. It will save you time and, if the teacher is good, it will make things much more clear.
>Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Again, the "back in my day" cliché. What is your basis for saying this. Sure, we can have a discussion about whether or not the abundance of material can make students more inclined to look everything up before giving it an honest shot, but a priori I would be inclined to say that more material and more teachers, accessible even to those not in formal education, can only be a good thing.
>Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
To be honest, this attitude makes me quite annoyed.
You will never in a million years catch me ragging on somebody that is making an honest effort to learn, even if they are struggling and it's taking them a long time to grasp the material. And clearly, if somebody is looking up teaching materials online of their own free will, they are interested and curious and motivated to learn. That's commendable, and it's a terribly arrogant and presumptuous thing to do IMO, chastising someone for not immediately understanding everything.
> You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
OTOH given the proliferation of tools a programmer uses in their day to day work and the large number of software dependencies these days, you could end up spending all your time figuring out problems with your tools/dependencies, rather than the problem your trying to solve.
I think it goes both ways. Yes the student has to expend effort to understand, but teachers can make a huge difference. With Stackoverflow, I think often the simple questions point to a possibility that technical documentation isn’t all that beginner friendly. That and a lack of good examples in many tech docs. Good questions answered by good teachers can be an amazing shortcut to better understanding.
> But it’s more your own lack if you’re not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself
Maybe that in itself is a taught skill?
Disraeli said “the fool wonders, the wise man asks”
You just explained the issue: they're really not into it. They're often going through the motions because they see there's money there or the mythical 'good job' their parents keep telling them to get as far as computing/programming is concerned. In decades past, they would be asking the same questions re: business (or perhaps law or med) school.
The influence of Big Media may show its power here. Back in the early web, we had lots of unprofessional sites with valuable information created by freaks who were doing it out of passion. Now we have hundreds of "How to create microservices on X cloud with k8s" promotionals leaving out the background bits and catering to the naive.
I always tell my clients' staff "There are no such questions as 'stupid' questions" to encourage them to explore. People in many cultures don't explore by and large because they're afraid of ridicule. I take pains to tell everyone who is exploring, including myself, that while exploring a new skill, concept or task, a state of discomfort and clumsiness is normal. Somehow our "go-fast", pre-packaged-experience culture has forgotten this lesson that every infant learns early on.
This "what should I do?" posture permeates many retiring individuals, as well. I have an Emacs Org file with over 6,000 lines of "I want to try this..." reminders that I'm adding to many times a week and sometimes several times a day, so this is very much a "...not where I came from..." that I've puzzled over for awhile. I hypothesize that this happens because many people allow a perception (whether by themselves or via others) that pigeon-holes themselves and their human potential.
IT, like Medicine, is seen today as a pathway to a good job and financial security. So there are tons of people entering the field with no real interest in it.
You don't have to visit Stackoverflow, if you are in a regular work environment it is likely you encounter this mentality every day. Heck I have coworkers who won't even ask the question!
Yet this may be a broader issue, an education issue. As in, if we don't teach children to do and instead tell them they deserve or are entitled are we forever hampering their progress?
Its ironic that with literally all of human knowledge a google search away, people still don't do basic research and will ask questions online which can all be answered with a lmgtfy link.
I don't mean the search results that point to Stackoverflow, which are usually common patterns/answers. I mean looking up official docs, reading the code, just trying things without immediately looking for someone to handhold you through everything. You don't need to read medium articles or watch youtube for every single thing. Even a lot of tech conferences are full of talks going over the same basics over and over again, and these are meant for programmers.
This is a result of social media proliferation and the desire to do everything online and enhance your profile instead of just getting some work done. Y
One path to knowledge is to answer questions on stackoverflow about them - i.e. google, look at docs, try things, think, etc. This works when askers don't know how to work things out for themselves.
Maybe that's what they need to learn; though maybe they aren't interested in learning it...
OTOH I find many maths explanations wouldn't make sense if I wasn't able to already "imagine it inside my mind by myself" i.e if I didn't already understand it. IMHO this is the fundamental problem of education...
> "when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit"
You should have made an effort in fixing grammar in the above sentence before putting people down like that. At least, they are trying and not giving up. That's commendable
Completely agree (with you and Linus). I keep seeing these special programmes to try to get certain groups of people into programming. But the computers are right there. If they were interested they would have done it already. I wish people would stop trying to get people into this who really aren't interested in anything but the money.
> Bob: Anything else you want to comment on, either publicly or otherwise?
> Linus: I've never had some "message" that I wanted to spread, so ...
It's a pity that a man with such influence has no message that he wants to spread, but I can somehow understand this respond. My personal take of this quote can refer to another quote from his TED interview[1]:
> I’m an engineer. I’m perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, “I want to go there,” but I’m looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole that’s right in front of me before I fall in.
While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen.
>While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen.
And I'm very much happy not everyone uses their influence to turn every speech into a political opinion. If I read a Linus piece, I want to read about Linux, software engineering, git, kernels, operating systems, etc. If he started rambling about democracy and human rights, it would only introduce noise for me.
> While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen.
If you are a sensible person, you also know it's not possible to have an opinion about everything out there. Every topic is a rabbit hole if you want to understand everything in and out. Most politicians only touch at the surface of things and never go in details. I can understand why someone like an engineer may be reluctant to talk about politics in that sense.
I did read about him being philosophical before but it could be that "radical Randists" twisted his words [0]
I read this after I just read Atlas Shrugged and wondered how my convictions fitted into the objectivists' world view. Whether this was the real Linus or not, I liked his view, as I generally do. And it matches his down-to-earth-ness. BTW: Please don't butcher my karma again for mentioning Ayn ;)
Probably smart; if he makes any political statement, ANY, he'll draw in a lot of drama, media coverage, angry mobs with pitchforks - shit he can't and shouldn't be arsed with.
Linus’ view on anonymity was surprising to read. I’m not sure I agree with him on that but his view on social media being a platform for the lowest common denominator sure seems agreeable.
I'm kinda surprised it isn't getting more attention here. I wonder what his opinion of "the right to be forgotten" (a.k.a., "the right to take back stupid shit you once said").
He’s essentially a performer/personality though, and I’m inclined to say his answer is a self-serving performance itself. It would be fine, except that he writes out people who have valid reasons for anonymity - from “i feel like it”, on up. I’m personally not fussed by Linus’ antics, but cringe thinking about sensitive people, maybe still forming their personalities or sense of self, looking up to him.
Hard to argue with his technical chops and many successes, but that doesn’t make him expert in everything he’s got an opinion on. He even punts on a softball question and makes it about himself: “what advice do you have for young programmers and students?” - how about “have fun, exercise and stay healthy and dive in!”
I’m sorry to be negative here, but I wish Linus did better in this regard.
Rust fans should contribute to Rust kernels and stop suggesting porting existing ones like Linux, rewriting existing working code without introducing new bugs and changing behavior is hard and expensive as in developer hours, it is faster to do it from scratch in your favorite language with your favorite patterns and drop legacy stuff(even this means you will have less possible users then Linux).
Btw. ice hockey is _not_ the national sport of Finland (it's not even the national sport of Canada!). The Finnish national sport is pesäpallo (Finnish baseball).
> Nancy and I and our three daughters are all doing well. Our eldest, Zoe, who was 11 when Marc and I started Red Hat, is expecting her second child—meaning I'm a grandparent.
First off, I don’t give a damn about the interviewer’s family, Red Hat founder or not. Not sure why it’s included in the article. But you know who does? Identity thieves. I feel like Young should be more aware of the issues this kind of thing can pose. He’s a high net worth guy and it seems reckless to publish anywhere, much less an unprotected article like this one.
You're going to have to learn to deal with some editorialization. That's part of life and reading articles on the internet You're an anonymous observer to two peoples' conversation, who clearly have a history that spans decades. Stay in your lane.
[+] [-] ben165|7 years ago|reply
>Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.
This is a problem I don't understand too. If you are really into something you motivating yourself in doing things. You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
[+] [-] jaabe|7 years ago|reply
That being said, I do think people owe it to themselves to read the documentation first. I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option. There are a few exceptions of course, when the official documentation flat out sucks.
I do think we have a general issue with how we teach CS though. Especially outside the hardcore CS degree, because we’re really not teaching young people computation anymore, we’re teaching them how to produce results. This is especially true for places like Udemy and YouTube, but it’s frankly also true on more UX centric or academy/bachelor level degrees.
I do external examinations on academy levels, and earlier this year I went to a place where they teach associate degrees in CS. Only they opted to build their places as a “gaming education”, so they had a heavy emphasis on Unity. And sure enough, the students were pretty good at unity, but only a handful of them knew how to calculate Big O of a few simple examples and only a single student knew how a computer actually works.
When I did my own freshman year, one of my first tests was to decode a hidden message by altering the contents of a bitmap file using C. That’s pretty useless, sure, but it teaches you a lot of things, including how to read the official documentation for a bitmap, which is a much more useful skill than knowing how to use a certain version of some framework. At least in my opinion.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|7 years ago|reply
I resemble that remark!
It was just yesterday that I was looking up a bit of JavaScript trivia, how to format a number rounded to some number of decimal places.
Yeah, I'm supposed to be some kind of JavaScript expert, so I could have done the obvious "mdn tofixed", right?
But I was working on a Google Maps API project and typed in the first thing that popped into my mind:
https://www.google.com/search?q=six+digit+decimal+place+goog...
And you know what? It took me straight to my own Stack Overflow answer where I explained how to do this, either preserving or removing any trailing zeroes.
Who needs to remember things when you have a service like that? ;-)
[+] [-] leesec|7 years ago|reply
Like really, if you were to try to learn Korean (assuming you don't know it) right now, you think you'd have any simple questions that someone who'd been speaking Korean all their life would find absurdly easy?
Everyone starts from somewhere, this sort of ego-ist stuff is toxic. It is okay to be bad at things and it is okay to ask dumb questions.
[+] [-] S_A_P|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
Wow, why the aggressiveness? This strikes me as prime "/r/iamverysmart" material. Yes, we get it, you figured everything out for yourself, well done -.- Yet if something is not trivially apparent to somebody (as everything seems to be to you) why should they not ask questions in a website whose purpose is to ask questions. I find it's almost always better to just ask for help when you are stuck rather than bang your head on a brick wall for hours. It will save you time and, if the teacher is good, it will make things much more clear.
>Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.
Again, the "back in my day" cliché. What is your basis for saying this. Sure, we can have a discussion about whether or not the abundance of material can make students more inclined to look everything up before giving it an honest shot, but a priori I would be inclined to say that more material and more teachers, accessible even to those not in formal education, can only be a good thing.
>Same with YouTube, when people explaining simple math things with extremely effort people complaining then that today's teachers are shit. But it's more your own lack if you're not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself.
To be honest, this attitude makes me quite annoyed.
You will never in a million years catch me ragging on somebody that is making an honest effort to learn, even if they are struggling and it's taking them a long time to grasp the material. And clearly, if somebody is looking up teaching materials online of their own free will, they are interested and curious and motivated to learn. That's commendable, and it's a terribly arrogant and presumptuous thing to do IMO, chastising someone for not immediately understanding everything.
[+] [-] krmboya|7 years ago|reply
OTOH given the proliferation of tools a programmer uses in their day to day work and the large number of software dependencies these days, you could end up spending all your time figuring out problems with your tools/dependencies, rather than the problem your trying to solve.
[+] [-] groundCode|7 years ago|reply
> But it’s more your own lack if you’re not able to imagine these thing inside your mind by yourself
Maybe that in itself is a taught skill?
Disraeli said “the fool wonders, the wise man asks”
[+] [-] blihp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iovrthoughtthis|7 years ago|reply
Instead of spending hours working to understand and implement a concept / fix. Get other people to do it for internet points.
Seems surpisingly “smart” to me.
It all depends on what you’re optinizing for.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yourapostasy|7 years ago|reply
I always tell my clients' staff "There are no such questions as 'stupid' questions" to encourage them to explore. People in many cultures don't explore by and large because they're afraid of ridicule. I take pains to tell everyone who is exploring, including myself, that while exploring a new skill, concept or task, a state of discomfort and clumsiness is normal. Somehow our "go-fast", pre-packaged-experience culture has forgotten this lesson that every infant learns early on.
This "what should I do?" posture permeates many retiring individuals, as well. I have an Emacs Org file with over 6,000 lines of "I want to try this..." reminders that I'm adding to many times a week and sometimes several times a day, so this is very much a "...not where I came from..." that I've puzzled over for awhile. I hypothesize that this happens because many people allow a perception (whether by themselves or via others) that pigeon-holes themselves and their human potential.
[+] [-] cptskippy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
Yet this may be a broader issue, an education issue. As in, if we don't teach children to do and instead tell them they deserve or are entitled are we forever hampering their progress?
[+] [-] dirkg|7 years ago|reply
I don't mean the search results that point to Stackoverflow, which are usually common patterns/answers. I mean looking up official docs, reading the code, just trying things without immediately looking for someone to handhold you through everything. You don't need to read medium articles or watch youtube for every single thing. Even a lot of tech conferences are full of talks going over the same basics over and over again, and these are meant for programmers.
This is a result of social media proliferation and the desire to do everything online and enhance your profile instead of just getting some work done. Y
[+] [-] hyperpallium|7 years ago|reply
Maybe that's what they need to learn; though maybe they aren't interested in learning it...
OTOH I find many maths explanations wouldn't make sense if I wasn't able to already "imagine it inside my mind by myself" i.e if I didn't already understand it. IMHO this is the fundamental problem of education...
[+] [-] mandeepj|7 years ago|reply
You should have made an effort in fixing grammar in the above sentence before putting people down like that. At least, they are trying and not giving up. That's commendable
[+] [-] engineerworks|7 years ago|reply
Why do you see people as possessing equal problem solving abilities and resources?
What will society benefit the most from? Teaching the people at bottom and bringing them to average or teaching the top ones and moving them to edge?
[+] [-] black-tea|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qlk1123|7 years ago|reply
> Linus: I've never had some "message" that I wanted to spread, so ...
It's a pity that a man with such influence has no message that he wants to spread, but I can somehow understand this respond. My personal take of this quote can refer to another quote from his TED interview[1]:
> I’m an engineer. I’m perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, “I want to go there,” but I’m looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole that’s right in front of me before I fall in.
While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights, it is just not possible to happen.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Why would he have any great insight on "democracy or human rights" compared the average population? Because he wrote successful software?
[+] [-] oraphalous|7 years ago|reply
Or maybe people who have no particular expertise in political matters should stop opining so much about them?
And maybe we should stop politicising all aspects of culture and existence. There is so much more to life.
[+] [-] throwawaylolx|7 years ago|reply
And I'm very much happy not everyone uses their influence to turn every speech into a political opinion. If I read a Linus piece, I want to read about Linux, software engineering, git, kernels, operating systems, etc. If he started rambling about democracy and human rights, it would only introduce noise for me.
[+] [-] ekianjo|7 years ago|reply
If you are a sensible person, you also know it's not possible to have an opinion about everything out there. Every topic is a rabbit hole if you want to understand everything in and out. Most politicians only touch at the surface of things and never go in details. I can understand why someone like an engineer may be reluctant to talk about politics in that sense.
[+] [-] rujuladanh|7 years ago|reply
Really, who cares? No, he is not a "leader" in any way outside kernel development.
Are we going to ask everyone now for their opinions on anything just because they are domain experts on something completely unrelated?
What is next? Asking (insert random famous politician) about kernel development?
[+] [-] ToFab123|7 years ago|reply
Maybe he just like playing with computers?
[+] [-] teekert|7 years ago|reply
I read this after I just read Atlas Shrugged and wondered how my convictions fitted into the objectivists' world view. Whether this was the real Linus or not, I liked his view, as I generally do. And it matches his down-to-earth-ness. BTW: Please don't butcher my karma again for mentioning Ayn ;)
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&ei=6IOkXO2a...
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eljimmy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonmoltke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bch|7 years ago|reply
Hard to argue with his technical chops and many successes, but that doesn’t make him expert in everything he’s got an opinion on. He even punts on a softball question and makes it about himself: “what advice do you have for young programmers and students?” - how about “have fun, exercise and stay healthy and dive in!”
I’m sorry to be negative here, but I wish Linus did better in this regard.
[+] [-] eartheaterrr|7 years ago|reply
>The kind of languages people see under active development aren't for low-level system programming.
I found it interesting that he didn't mention Rust. Or is Rust not suitable for kernel development?
[+] [-] simion314|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrederickZh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nr7|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ardon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decoyworker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] std_throwawayay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortdeus|7 years ago|reply
The questions he asked doesn't even give us new insight into Linus's opinions on tech.
[+] [-] tomcam|7 years ago|reply
> Nancy and I and our three daughters are all doing well. Our eldest, Zoe, who was 11 when Marc and I started Red Hat, is expecting her second child—meaning I'm a grandparent.
First off, I don’t give a damn about the interviewer’s family, Red Hat founder or not. Not sure why it’s included in the article. But you know who does? Identity thieves. I feel like Young should be more aware of the issues this kind of thing can pose. He’s a high net worth guy and it seems reckless to publish anywhere, much less an unprotected article like this one.
[+] [-] wcarron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgeeek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|7 years ago|reply