Wisdom is the prime thing

Taken from a speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

This tutorial, Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python is just tremendous. I learned some new stuff here and there, and the guidelines for module formatting I found very practical. Good stuff.

Plus, there is a great quote by Brian Kernighan:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

t’s amazing to me that it took so long for me to read Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. I even quote from it fairly often. But up till now, I had never read it.

Altogether, I enjoyed it, but not for all the reasons I imagined I would.

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