There’s this overemphasis on reusable software where you never get to open up the box. It’s nice to have these boxes but, almost always, if you look inside the box you can improve it and make work better once you know what’s inside the box. ~ Donald E. Knuth (Excerpt from Coders At Work.)

Second excerpt I posted from the book, Coders At Work that has so deep meaning.

Even though we use so many different libraries and APIs both lower and higher level, if we don’t know what these APIs and libraries do or how they work then, it’s just like using one of those anonymous black boxes with lots of magic.

Coders at Work has to be one of the most read books for programmers and/or software developers of all levels. Among 15 sets of Q/A with most probably great programmers of all time, I want to share paragraph of a conversation with Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of Memcached and co-founder of LiveJournal.

The one way they think about solving things is always within the space they know. They don’t think end-to-end as much. I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack.

Polyglotism is a way to go!!!