Lord Palmerston on Programming

Joel on Software writes a decent screed on programming knowledge, the various worlds they inhabit, and the disparities between people who know and people who *know*: Lord Palmerston on Programming:

I see otherwise intelligent people writing blog entries saying something vacuous like "Microsoft is bad at operating systems," frankly, they just look dumb. Imagine trying to summarize millions of lines of code with hundreds of major feature areas created by thousands of programmers over a decade or two, where no one person can begin to understand even a large portion of it. I'm not even defending Microsoft, I'm just saying that big handwavy generalizations made from a position of deep ignorance is one of the biggest wastes of time on the net today.

It's a good read. I've never held myself as a Perl "expert" - I think I know more than some, and yes, I think I have more experience than others, but there's insane amounts of room to improve. I've never written an OOP module. Hell, I've never written a CPAN module at all. I don't understand closures, complicated regexp syntax, and the Perl 6 apocalypses make me blush. I've never done POD documentation, nor have I done automated testing of the code (hand in hand with Makefiles, which I've never done either). There's so much more for me to learn that I don't even attempt to act like an expert - I still run to books every day I'm coding, I still ask really dumb questions because the trees are bigger than the forest, and I still love leaning toothpicks.