Constant Learning
One of my favorite quotes comes from Ron Jeffries on his blog Hot Needle of Inquiry:
“the river is moving, and if we don’t keep rowing, we are going to drift back downstream”
The quote reminds me of the importance of self-improvement. If we stop learning we are nothing but dead material in the stream of life. Ron seems to have stopped updating his blog, which is sad because it was one of my favorites.
Today I read a really interesting post on Debasish Ghosh’s blog. He shows how you can get object-orientation in a functional language using closures. I knew it could be done, but I hadn’t seen it in code before. Neat, but I received the real learning opportunity from one of the comments, in which Gabriel C. states “LOVED the Koan”.
I didn’t have a clue of what a Koan was, but Wikipedia came to my rescue:
“A koan is a story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to Intuition.”
Thank you Debasish and Gabriel, you made me exercise rowing today too.