Friday, July 09, 2004

Feeling Stupid

Matt Warren points out that Feeling Stupid is a typical part of programming.

“You feel stupid because you know many others have already figured it out, already understood and moved on, but you're still stuck trying to muddle through it.”
I regularly feel this way when perusing the fantastic coding exampels put up by others. Partly that's going to be because programming is less than 10% of what I do, it has been a long time since it was more than that. But it's also because there is always someone that knows more than we do.

This might be true of programming more than most disciplines, because it is an ever changing field of study. Matt describes it as this "discipline/art/science/voodoo magic thing that we do". Sometimes it seems like voodoo (pass the chicken Dave, I need to wave it over the keyboard a few more times), and sometimes it seems like art because a solution just feels right. Mostly it is a discipline, the study of which usually takes a back seat to the practice of it - which invariably leads to feeling stupid at some point.

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