It's about stories and not the technical details

Someone said that if you can explain something to a 6 year old kid then you have really grasped the idea.

Let's say it's true.

How are you going to explain anything to a child? Are you going to make him read SICP first? What if he won't? Will you punish him? How cute, because that's exactly the kind of relations you see between programmers and their project managers.

What I failed to realize before was the fact that most of the developers ARE children in many ways. Not in any good way, unfortunately.

So what is it so special about children and how do they differ from us grown-ups?

Wait a second.

Another one.

Here it comes.

They don't judge.

That is "a judgment without due examination of facts and evidence".
See.. they don't have that many facts in their little heads, so they can't critisize based on their experience (because of the lack of it). So they accept things without contradictions.
And some people still wonder: Why is it that everybody thinks that children can learn so well and we grown-ups cannot?
Prejudice, stupid!

Now what I really need is a quote from a tough guy.
Here you go:

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.
Clint Eastwood

So how could we change ourselves in one way or another so that we could do the stuff they do so well?
* Accept new events in your life without trying to prove them wrong.
* Try understand it as much as possible and then build connections with your existing knowledge.
* Don't use facts you already have against the new stuff you are trying to learn. Instead combine them together to create new from existing.

So far, so good. But where am I pointing?

I like to read articles by Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and Paul Graham, just to name a few. Wait, I forgot Zed Shaw. Any list of the most influential people in the Software Developing will be incomplete without Zed's name in it. And Albahari. Martin Fowler is a must read and that goes without saying (you didn't really think that I am going to skip the guy, did you?). The list is strongly opinionated and doesn't need any additions from you, dear readers :).

The difference.

They don't tell you how you should code (or not only, because what good can a programmer do if he/she can't, you know.. program). What they try to achieve is to teach you new ideas, their understanding of the world.
And it matters big time.

They say if you achieve a good level of apprehension in one of the programming languages you can learn another one pretty quickly.

Zed says "It's Not You, It's Them". Don't waste your time here, go listen to him.

And try to get what is missing in you and why you are so different from them, little people.

It is my second article in my life, I would really appreciate any feedback (be it critic, notes or simply agree/don't agree)