Most of the big last gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? U

... See more

it’s perhaps better to learn through doing small and easily discarded projects that don’t lock us into one tool path. We’ll accrue tools and knowledge along the way, and those tools will better reflect our interests in the thing itself.