Lessons Learned

(Hugh)

1. You can’t do it all yourself.

2. You should start by doing what you can by yourself anyway.

3. Be patient.

4. Programming is not a magical activity.
Programmers are not wizards.

5. Your project will never be “done”.

6. Be a techno-realist, not a techno-utopian.

7. The environment isn’t static.

8. The environment does, and should, constrain you.

9. Dream large, but build small.

10. Set your work free.

Observations

(Ryan)

‘… minds unduly fascinated by computers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question that computers can answer...’

– Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line ‘Mother Jacobs Home Remedies’,” The New Yorker, December 1, 1962, p. 148.

“The tools we employ at once extend and limit our ability to conceive the world.”

– David Hestenes, Oersted Medal Lecture 2002: Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics

“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”

- Albert Einstein

“I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions: ‘Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!’ They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, ‘Observe!’ is absurd.”

- Karl Popper