From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: C H Forsyth Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 09:53:12 +0000 To: russcox@gmail.com, 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] writing code In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4c2d7670-eace-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 >>i agree that it would be great to have a list of interesting problems >>to solve, but i'm not sure we could actually figure out beforehand >>which solutions are the best ones or even which are complete flops. i think that might be taken as a definition of an `interesting problem' (or more accurately, an `interesting solution' to a perceived problem). a friend of mine worked for a time for a famous computer scientist, who produced many interesting ideas. paraphrasing a bit, my friend said that half-way through an implementation, there were usually two results: ``this is brilliant!'', or ``why am i here??''. he said it was rarely possible even to guess which would result beforehand.