Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
«
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom)
have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a
wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition,
painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in
neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts:
even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years
before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the
Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene, appearing on the Ed Sullivan
show in 1964. But they had been playing since 1957, and while they
had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success,
Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it
took longer than ten years: “Excellence in any department can be
attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at
a lesser price.” And Chaucer complained “the lyf so short, the craft
so long to lerne.”
»
