norvig

I never really thought of Peter Norvig as a 'programmer' in the sense of Linus Torvalds -- I always lumped Norvig more into the high minded computer scientist camp.

You should also take a look at sources of paulgraham.com, norvig.com and tlb.org.

Even Norvig (condescendingly) concedes that idiot dummies can become bad programmers.

> very few people are programmers at the level of a Linus Torvalds, Peter Norvig or Fabrice Bellard.

To be fair, the reason Norvig was so successful was he knew exactly the sort of problem soduku was and how to solve it, whereas Ron lacked this background knowledge.

I wonder if the reviewer knew who Norvig is.

> And let’s not kid ourselves, very very few people are programmers at the level of a Linus Torvalds, Peter Norvig or Fabrice Bellard.

Reminds me of that blog thread where this design pattern guru hemmed and hawed from his high horse over several posts about how to write constrained based solvers and still did not get to a piece of code that actually solved the problem, whereas Norvig just posted a simple solution.

To master programming (like everything else) takes a lot of effort thought (check out Peter Norvig's "Teach yourself programming in Ten years" [1]).

"Design patterns are bug reports against your programming language." — Peter Norvig Maybe we're on the cusp of enlightenment.

Norvig's code is compact and elegant, whereas mine is spaghetti code at best.

I have Norvig's book, I'm not sure I'd recommend that as an introduction;) Awesome book though!

Norvig can call them idiot dummies from his ivory tower all day long, but these guys created a business from nothing, and it's still around today.