I'm not certain that I agree with this because a URL makes no claims about idempotency or side-effects or many other behaviors that we take for granted when building systems. While it is possible to construct such a system, URLs do not guarantee this.
I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them.
I'm all for elegant URL design but they're just one part of the puzzle.
Agree that saying "intimate understanding" is a bit off the mark. Had the author written "intuitive understanding", it would have made a bit more sense.
However, given the prevalence of the von Neumann computing architecture, I don't think it's completely off the mark - even if people don't know von Neumann's name :)
I think society, collectively, puts a lot of currency is "knowing what you're going to do". It's a question that adults ask children, especially precocious ones.
But, frankly, it's pretty much bullshit.
I was an average student in university. The courses I liked, I did well in. The ones that I struggled to engage with, not so much. The reality is that once you are out in the real world, no one's going to tell you what to do.
If getting a CS degree is that important to you, then stick with it until you can qualify for it. But there's no requirement that you must have one just because you want to work in the field.
Note: There might be companies that won't consider you as a candidate if you don't have a CS degree. My recommendation is that, again, unless you really want to work at a company like that, find your own path.
I had the interesting experience to work at Palm in the early 2000's on a project that was to compete with the Blackberry.
Needless to say, it never saw the light of day but I still remember that we had to ask the PalmOS engineering group to create a hardware layer thread so that we could do network I/O in parallel with running the user app.
It was an enormously challenging platform to work with.
Interesting narrative - all we need is Bruce Willis at the controls and we’re gold ;)
I’m sure it was all planned and coordinated with their marketing team. After all, they need to figure out important things like how much fuel, time to arrival, etc.
Definitely experienced this as well playing music in public.
I also experienced a variation of it when I did karate. During sparring, once my sparring partners hit me for the first time, I was able to start focusing on sparring and not the fear of being struck.
I remember taking a graduate level networking course at NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC and several other commercial products.
One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were going to study TCP/IP.
He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking protocol."
So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the curve :)
I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them.
I'm all for elegant URL design but they're just one part of the puzzle.