Today a link to an LWN article was posted, titled: The early days of Linux and it kinda got to me. Linux was 7 years old when I first installed Redhat and later SuSE Linux. Mostly I just messed around with it, trying to get online, read my emails and play around with various tools. Never did I sit down with the goal of trying to learn or understand anything in-depth. I could have been a Linux genius, had I had direction, dedication and a purpose.
Later when I started programming I mostly cobbled things together, that has gotten me pretty far in life to be honest. While I naturally picked up certain things along the way, I still never managed to build that deep understanding and knowledge that I so envy in others. Python is the language I use the most, so I understand it the best, but I'm not even close to the level of understanding I see in the people I admire. Everything is just whatever I happened to pick up along the way.
When Google introduced Go in 2009, I became pretty interested, but my interest never amounted to much more than a few toy examples. Every time I try to pickup Go these days I have to start over and the language have grown since those early days, meaning that there's much more to learn from the start. These days I look at Hare and wonder if this is my chance to start over and finally get started in those early days of a language. The sad truth is that I probably won't.
This brings me back to the LWN article. Linus Torvalds started out knowing next to nothing. Someone else had to write him an sprintf function, because he didn't know how. Unlike me, Linus just struck to hit project and grew with it. I envy that, I'd like to have that drive, that passion.
Maybe it's all just about finding projects you truly care about?