The Goldfish Chronicles

Lots of various threads are merging into one while I watch an evolution program on Discovery. Evolution has two strategies, specialise or generalise. Most animals on the planets are specialists, generalism has been a major aspect in Human evolution however.

I’ve been reading Asimov’s 2nd autobiography recently in which he starts as a childhood prodigy and then matures [fails] into a generalist, though he does get lucky and discover he’s an expert at talking in public.

I thought I’d become a specialist in the last few years, going from someone who learnt a new language every few months, dabbled and played in many areas, to someone who focused on Java and things that support Java [Linux, databases], but reading Asimov I realise that I’m surprisingly [for me] falling into the trap of trapping myself in a box.

While I’ve been specialising in Java, I’ve also been generalising in History [Europa Universalis is a great game, and I’m currently reading about Polish history] and spending a lot of time experimenting with the development process.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 at 10:26 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.