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Re: Why would anyone want opacity?



|   Cc: wand@ccs.neu.edu, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk, will@ccs.neu.edu,
|	   rrrs-authors@martigny.ai.mit.edu
|   Date: Thu, 09 May 96 15:27:56 -0400
|   From: "ozan s. yigit" <oz@nexus.yorku.ca>
|
|
|   >					  I'd rather train
|   > thinkers who can learn skills than skilled idiot savants who can't think.
|
|   this reminds me something a previous edition of you (jinx) once said:
|
|   "the ability not to think (or to think very little) and yet write and
|   fix programs is a feature, not a bug"

These are not inconsistent.  I've defended for a long time that
thinking is a terrible way of doing things _except_ when no other is
available.  It is like the old saying about democracy "democracy is
the worst form of government except for all others".

The point of thinking is not that it is fast or accurate, but general
purpose.   Because it is error-prone, difficult, and slow, I need
tools with power for it than I do for the mostly mechanical task
of coding.