What is on Your Mind?

Food for thought!

"""
Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer...because it teaches you how to think.
"""
Steve Jobs.

So, SO, true!

Merry XMAS all...

Merry Xmas!

Merry Christmas,

Yes, and also to note - learning to program a computer does not guarantee you will be wise or develop a deeper understanding of life, physics, sciences, cultures and peoples.

Programming is but one of the many skills people should constantly strive to develop and learn.

I recommend listening to this audiobook, which I started on Christmas Eve and finished on Christmas Day. An excellent mix of physics, science, philosophy and poetry, "The Order of Time" is well written and superbly performed.

I pass on this one. My brain is not made for programming. Though I think I can handle pretty much everything else pretty well, and I am now nearing 34 years working in various fields in IT, I just pass on scripting on everything longer than a very long one-liner. Not for lack of trying. I do understand scripts in various scripting languages well enough to debug them, to adjust them to my needs and to expand them if necessary. But I could not write one on my own if my life depends on it. Does this make me dumb?

Apologies for any typos.
No it doesn't make you dumb, it means you have not found your niche to create an "_app'_" to take on and maybe even excel at compared to your peers.
It also means that you probably have much more activity in other fields in your private life which would make you think a lot.

I found mine in the late 90s:
My programming niche...

This started me on the road to my multi language learning.
I hadn't ever seen a shell script until joining this site in January 2013 so I jumped in at the deep end bragging with an AudioScope.sh, a SINGLE "bash" script which has, and is, still being gently followed.
I deliberately placed limits on it and the biggest one was the I/O. ONLY the mic and ear are allowed for input and output. USB, Parallel, Serial and others are NOT allowed.
These had to deliver DC as well as AC components on input and output. I got a tremendous amount of help from the big guns on here and from these beginnings I have done some really strange things and most are POSIX compliant:
A DFT in a PURE ksh93 shell script.
A GOTO function.
A Fixed Point SQRT using integer maths.
And much more, all on this site. Most have been bettered by my peers who still know much more than I do about UNIX scripting.
Why?
As a pure learning task to see if it is possible and nothing more.
I am working on a POSIX compliant DFT using integer arithmetic ATM and it is seriously tough. I don't expect it to work but I do have a natural ability to think laterally/orthogonally hence my bizarre uploads to this site.
So GO FOR IT, even if it is something like a CrossStitch Program or calculating the minimum area for a _mains_ cable carrying large current loads.
You would be surprised what you learn by taking on such a task.