IDKWITA. That means, I Don't Know What I'm Talking About. It applies to me.
I originally wanted to say this as an introduction to an as-yet-unpublished blog entry, but I'd really like to be able to link to this in the future, so it gets its own entry. Namely, this one.
What I want to say here is this (take a guess): I Don't Know What I'm Talking About. This is a general rule. Just take any random subject I'm talking about, and if you want to know whether I know what I'm talking about, run it through this JS/ECMAScript function:
function does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about(subject){
return false;
}
Let us examine the workings of this function.
$ smjs
js> function does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about(subject){
return false;
}
js> does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about("code");
false
js> does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about("everything else");
false
js> does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about("anything at all");
false
I don't even know if I know what I'm talking about when the subject is knowing what I'm talking about!
js> does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about(does_adam_know_what_hes_talking_about);
false
In all seriousness, though, I don't know what I'm talking about. Correct me if I ever say otherwise.
In the next couple of weeks I'm planning to write about programming languages, and in particular, models of programs and runtimes. I've learned a lot just recently about it, and anything I wrote before now was brutally misinformed and uninformed; anything that wasn't flat-out incorrect was an incredibly lucky coincidence. I don't have any reason to think that that I'll consider what I'm writing now any differently in a few short months, which is why I'm saying IDKWITA now.
Comments
16 spam comments omitted.
I am no longer accepting new comments.
Matthew Marshall
#1424, 2008-01-03T21:29:24Z
The more I learn, the less I know. It's only when I start to understand a field that I realize IDKWITA.
That's a great acronym :) I think I'll start using it.
MWM
Al
#1435, 2008-01-04T06:31:54Z
Adam,
Have you planned out what items you're planning on covering and if so, can we have a couple of hints?
Al.
Adam Gomaa
#1436, 2008-01-04T09:24:43Z
Yes, and of course. Runtimes. JVM, .NET/Mono/CLR, the JS engines, Parrot, LLVM. These are things that I have absolutely no knowledge about, and I will be making sweeping judgements about them, both in technical details I'm clueless about and other things I'm equally clueless about.
But it's all very exciting stuff.
Of course, the search for a perfect runtime is itself just a precursor to an application I've had in mind, which requires a lot of runtime introspection, but which I want to be programming language agnostic. Which may well turn out to be mutually exclusive goals, but you gotta start somewhere, and I'm starting with the assumption that it's possible.
Which, I think, is a better assumption than the alternative.