Mozilla's mission wasn't to conduct charity to the point of self annihilation which is what would've occured had they not spun off the rust division. Non-profits cannot sustain themselves without positive cash flow. Just look at Ikea, they're a non-profit.
>Nobody's saying you have to build an airplane to know how it works, the point is you have to know how it works to either build it, or fly it effectively. You won't know why it stalls if you don't know what makes it stay up.
You said it. You quoted Feynman saying it. So if you didn't mean that then you made a mistake here. Ok the. I agree with the rest of your post then.
However my main point still stands the systems we build as humans are too complex for a single person to understand. In order to deal with this complexity most of programming involves investigating and testing libraries that abstract away this complexity. It is more.important to know this then it is to construct highly modular fp style code.
It depends what you want to do. If you want to work on problems that we know how to solve and that we have solved many times, then the npm xenobiology skill set is sufficient; if you want to do things we haven't done and don't know how to do, it isn't. I've acquired knowledge by poking at libraries and databases and OSes, and those are sunk costs. Apart from the instrumental value at the time, most such knowledge has had no lasting or further use to me. I've acquired other knowledge and skills from books including SICP, and those have continued to pay lifelong dividends with compounding interest over decades.
Domain knowledge can shift but not always. npm and javascript are around to stay. Same with most of the linux API.
It is true that the fundamentals that SICP teaches will be around forever, but the fact of the matter is, if I'm an employer I'd rather hire a specialist in some arbitrary ephemeral domain relevant to my business then to hire someone who is a generalist.
You're in good company, that's an extremely popular perspective. Those of use who are more generalist often have to find our own ways. The rewards are usually worth it.
>Nobody's saying you have to build an airplane to know how it works, the point is you have to know how it works to either build it, or fly it effectively. You won't know why it stalls if you don't know what makes it stay up.
You said it. You quoted Feynman saying it. So if you didn't mean that then you made a mistake here. Ok the. I agree with the rest of your post then.
However my main point still stands the systems we build as humans are too complex for a single person to understand. In order to deal with this complexity most of programming involves investigating and testing libraries that abstract away this complexity. It is more.important to know this then it is to construct highly modular fp style code.