Reading these letters was heart-warming.
Code Bubbles: Rethinking the UI paradigm of Integrated Development Environments
in the beginning was the question
…a friend of mine asked me that a couple of nights ago, to my delight. my answer, of course, was
…as a matter of fact, any self-respecting programmer you’ve ever met is mostly self-taught. that’s because as soon as a neophyte starts coding, they find out…
Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you can make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
Carl Sagan, “The Burden of Skepticism”
Goddamn Electric Bill - Ten Thousand Years
