What fascinated about this article is that there's a whole other world out there of geeks/programmers/hackers beyond our English speaking world doing their own things and sharing their own ideas.
For a Theory of Computation class I had as a part of the homework to write a program that writes itself in one programming language. It is amazing that such programs exists that can switch languages and can go through several methamorphoses
That is pretty cool but really, could whoever wrote that not have spent however long that took (which I'm guessing is quite long) doing something a lot more worthwhile.
This is narrow minded. The same thing could be said about most any of the great thinkers of history... specifically those in Mathematics since it's so abstract. Arguably programming like this is closer to Math than hacking industry software.
There are of course a handful of exceptions like Benjamin Franklin who tended to be pragmatic. And there is nothing wrong about only being productive in a way that is economically quantitative. But I think there should be room for both.
That's like saying to new parents - "Wow, this kid you have for yourself, that's pretty cool; but really - could you not have wasted your time with that and build a business instead?"
