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Wed Apr 11 11:58:12 EDT 2001 · http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-April/079109.html

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 10:48:07AM -0400, Andrew Kuchling wrote:
>         "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain
>         originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock
>         it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the
>         lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
>         knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at
>         best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a
>         difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful
>         workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his
>         brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help
>         him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment,
>         and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think
>         that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any
>         extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
>         addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew
>         before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to
>         have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
>             -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
> 
> I agree with this, and don't like to clutter up my memory with useless
> fiddly details.  This explains why I never remember the switches for
> Unix commands like 'ps' and 'ls', why I gave up reading _Programming
> Perl_ 3 chapters in, and why I don't know C++.

Thanks for the wonderful quotation Andrew. I am so like that
that some people wonder if I have any skills. In general, I
know what a function does, I just don't remember how to call
it. Thanks to Fred's excellent documentation, I don't need to
remember. I just look up the order of the variables and go.

I think I will have to print out the quotation and post it on
my wall.

-- 
Stand Fast,
    tjg.

Timothy Grant                         tjg at exceptionalminds.com
Chief Technology Officer              www.exceptionalminds.com
HyperLINq Technologies, Inc.          <><       (503) 246-3630
>>>>>>>>>>>>>Linux, because rebooting is *NOT* normal<<<<<<<<<
>>>>This machine was last rebooted:  14 days 18:06 hours ago<<

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