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**Thorsten Ball:** Exactly. So the point is, in my book -- I wrote this on the landing page... The center of the book is the code. It has 200 pages and I guess half of it is probably code snippets. In other books... I have a few other compiler books sitting right here on the desk too, and the code is at the end of the ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Or it'll be pseudo-code... |
**Thorsten Ball:** \[laughs\] Yeah... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Like, you can't even compile it. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, you can't compile it. You're probably not gonna find the compiler that could compile this 15 years ago. That makes it really frustrating, because if you have code on your computer that's in the book, and you can actually copy and paste it or type it, that changes the ergonomics of the book, bec... |
In the introduction of the book I recommend that if you want to get the most out of the book, read it and try to type off the code or follow along by writing out the code, or copy and paste it, but try to follow the steps by actually building the interpreter. I think that's how I learn the best. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[39:50\] Carlisia, you mentioned I think on a prior show that there's a Coursera course for it... Is she still here? Did we lose her? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Uh-oh... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I'm sorry, I was muted. I was muted, I'm sorry! \[laughter\] I just found the link for the course, and I pasted it on Slack. The next session is going to start on 19th December. I should do it... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Do it. Do it, definitely. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah... I'm definitely doing it, I'm just questioning if I should do this one. |
**Thorsten Ball:** No, it's really good. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** It's all about time. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** If somebody wants to do it with me, ping me... You're motivating me. |
**Erik St. Martin:** If I delay our barbecue project any longer, Brian will probably come over here and kill me. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's not true. |
**Erik St. Martin:** ...so if you wanna wait until I finish that one or get further along on it, I'll do it with you. So I think we're at a good spot here to take a second sponsor break. When we get back -- I know that impostor syndrome is another thing that's kind of near and dear to you as well, Thorsten, and especia... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So let's take a quick sponsor break. |
**Break:** \[41:06\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** And we are back, talking to Thorsten Ball about his Go interpreter book and all things compilers, interpreters and learning low-level development. Before the break we kind of brought up impostor syndrome. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about that? The whole idea about learning hardware or co... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, okay. I'm a self-taught developer; I didn't go to college or study computer science and that's always in the back of my head, thinking "Oh, I'm missing something here." I think impostor syndrome is something that everybody experiences - developers, in general, even if they studied computer scie... |
What I experienced in the last years is every topic that at first feels super intimidating loses this appeal once you dig into it, and you start to realize "Wait a second, it's not really magic. Actually, it's pretty to understand here, and here" and then you grow up your understanding and you understand more. In the e... |
\[44:15\] The big part of it is trying to get over yourself and trying to tackle this and trying to get an understanding of it. |
One of the big things with impostor syndrome is that you always assume that, "Oh the other people - they know much more than I do. I don't know how compiler's work, but it seems like everybody else does. I don't know how interpreter languages work, but everybody else does", and so on. I think that's a fallacy. Probably... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I guess it's "Perception is reality", right? There's a couple things... I posted kind of a famous image for impostor syndrome, that kind of shows a big circle and a small dot. The big circle is "What I think other people know, and I'm just a tiny dot", and then it shows the reality, which is you're... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Exactly. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Brian and I have talked to people who worked on the Go compiler, and even they don't give themselves the credit that they should, because we admire their work, but to them, they feel like it's micro-improvements on things they've been doing their whole lives, right? They're compiler writers, that's... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I was just gonna give an analogy... I sat next to someone I won't name - for obvious reasons - at one of our speaker dinners at GopherCon and we were having a discussion... This is a person I admire greatly, from either internal or external part of the Go team, and the conversation we had made it ve... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, there's no one greater than the other, it's just different. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[47:51\] Yeah, I started trying to minimize my impostor syndrome by interacting more with people that I think are amazing, and I don't want to minimize the feeling, because it's real, I feel, and I think everybody feels it to whatever extent... It's funny, because you have these people you admir... |
You can totally interact with people like that and even collaborate if you open yourself up for them to help you, for example, and keeping in mind that maybe you can help them as well. It's brilliant. Then you start seeing, "I too have things to contribute." I think it helps a lot. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You know, Bryan Liles was on episode \#17 of the show, and one of the things that I loved that he said during that episode is "Stop comparing yourself to other people. Compare yourself to yourself." An analogy is "Today I'm one Brian..." The goal is to improve yourself, not to compare yourself to o... |
Then there may be people who just quickly glance on topics to try to simplify them for the audience, and they know far more about the topic than it leads on in their talk, but that's not what we see, that's not how we perceive it, and that's just kind of like the fallacy of it all. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. I think talks at conferences is a really good example, because you watch those talks and you're kind of in awe because you think, "Oh my god, they know so much", right? And you kind of have the assumption in your head that they wrote down these slides really fast, and you can probably wake this... |
Personally, my philosophy - I think Martin Fowler said this... He writes books to better understand what the book would be about. He starts and doesn't know everything about a certain topic, and he writes the book to better understand it. Then out comes the book and everybody assumes, "Oh, this guy, he has it all figur... |
The same thing is kind of happening... I get really shy -- people say to me, "Oh, you wrote a book... That's so impressive!" I know how the sausage is made now, and I'm always like "No, no, no... It's not that impressive." It took me a year to write it, and it's just markdown files, and... Oh my gosh, there's so many s... |
**Erik St. Martin:** ...As it was written in XML. \[laughter\] Picture that, anybody... Write a book in XML. \[laughter\] |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, that's the point. Like you said, that's the fallacy of it. If you see how the sausage is made, suddenly you realize, "Yeah, everybody else is doing the same thing I'm doing here", and that helps a lot. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That was actually something I was gonna bring up too with your book - you start to learn that in actually trying to write it, you've learned far more, because you wanna make sure that you're not going to say something incorrectly. So even if you think you know, you research and research and researc... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Right. |
**Erik St. Martin:** But I think people think that you just sat down and you're like, "Hm, I think tonight I'll write a book about interpreters." \[laughter\] |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah... "Let me put down really fast how much I know." It's not like that. Like you said, there were points while I was writing, and I was just gonna write the abstract syntax tree, right? And then you think, "Wait, is that correct? Is that an abstract syntax tree, or is that a syntax tree?" And then... |
**Erik St. Martin:** On all of that I would have to defer to you, because in this case I'm fairly certain you know more than I do about this stuff... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Definitely more than me. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I've never written one... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I don't know... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So, do you guys wanna move on to any interesting news and projects going on in the community? I know we've got a few more minutes left of the show. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Sure. |
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