"...When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated
top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year
in college because they had never learned how to study? It's a common
trap. A friend of mine calls it "the curse of the gifted" -- a tendency
to lean on your native ability too much, because you've always been
rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work."
"You are a brilliant implementor, more able than me and possibly (I say
this after consideration, and in all seriousness) the best one in the
Unix tradition since Ken Thompson himself. As a consequence, you
suffer the curse of the gifted programmer -- you lean on your ability
so much that you've never learned to value certain kinds of coding
self-discipline and design craftsmanship that lesser mortals *must*
develop in order to handle the kind of problem complexity you eat for
breakfast."
"Your tendency to undervalue modularization and code-sharing is one
symptom. Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or
release-engineering practices. To you, these things seem mostly like
overhead and a way of needlessly complicating your life. And so far,
your strategy has worked; your natural if relatively undisciplined
ability has proved more than equal to the problems you have set it.
That success predisposes you to relatively sloppy tactics like
splitting drivers before you ought to and using your inbox as a patch
queue."
